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DOMESTIC   DRAMAS 

(DBA3IES  DE  FAMILLE) 


^^' 


w 


DOMESTIC    DEAMAS 

(DBAMES   DE  FAMILLE) 


BY 

PAUL  BOURGET 


TRANSLATED  BY 

WILLIAM  MARCHANT 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1900 


% 


COPYRIGHT,   1900,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S   SONS 


Korinooti  Iprtss 

J.  8.  Cashing  &  Co.  -  Berwick  &  Smith 

Norwood  Mmi.  U.S.A. 


Ea  IHg  frienb 
GEORGES    SAINT-RENE-TAILLANDIER 


2125866 


CONTENTS 

PASS 

I.    The  Day  of  Reckoning 1 

II.  Other  People's  Luxury 88 

I.  A  Parisian  Family :  the  Husband        .        .      85 

II.  A  Parisian  Family :  the  Wife       ...     100 

III.  A  Parisian  Family :  the  Daughter       .        .    119 

IV.  The  Cost  of  the  Show 138 

V.    Mme.  Le  Prieux's  "  Day  "     .        .        .        .167 

VI.  Charles  Huguenin 191 

VII.  Revelations 212 

VIII.  Hector  Le  Prieux's  Plan       .        .        .        .252 

IX.  Epilogue 274 

III.  Children's  Hearts 281 

L    The  Talisman 283 

II.  Precocious  Feelings       .....    326 

III.  Resurrection 348 


THE  DAY  OF  RECKONING 


DOMESTIC  DRAMAS 
I 

THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 


When  a  history  of  ideas  in  France  in  the  nineteenth 
century  is  written,  one  of  the  periods  most  difficult  fitly 
to  characterize  will  be  that  of  the  generation  immedi- 
ately succeeding  the  war  of  1870.  Never,  indeed,  did 
more  contradictory  influences  act  simultaneously  in  the 
guidance  of  human  minds.  The  young  men  who  entered 
upon  life  at  that  date  met  in  those  next  older  than  them- 
selves the  whole  sum  of  philosophic  conceptions  elabo- 
rated under  the  Second  Empire.  M.  Taine  and  M.  Renan 
were  the  two  most  illustrious  representatives  of  these 
doctrines.  This  is  not  the  place  to  mention  them  in 
detail.  We  need  only  remember  that  an  absolute  faith 
in  Science  was,  so  to  speak,  their  basis,  and  that  the 
dogma  of  necessity  pervaded  the  work  of  these  masters 
from  beginning  to  end,  in  formulas  more  sharply  distinct 
with  Taine,  more  subtly  disguised  with  Renan.    Whether 

3 


4  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

or  not  they  desired  it,  their  teaching  resulted  in  complete 
fatalism.  The  historian  of  English  Literature  taught  us 
to  regard  all  civilization  as  the  product  of  race,  of  the 
environment,  and  of  the  period;  and  the  author  of  the 
Life  of  Jesus  showed  us  the  evolution  of  religious  thought 
throughout  the  centuries  as  ruled  by  natural  laws  no  less 
fixed  than  those  which  govern  the  development  of  an 
animal  or  vegetable  species.  These  hypotheses  may  be 
reconciled,  in  mature  minds,  with  energetic  action  and  a 
recognition  of  the  moral  law.  But  for  the  young  there 
resulted  from  them  only  pessimism  and  agnosticism,  and 
this  precisely  at  an  hour  when  the  disasters  of  war  and 
of  the  Commune  had  smitten  the  country  so  severely  and 
forced  upon  every  man's  conscience  the  evidence  of  his 
duty  to  the  community,  his  obligation  to  direct  and  use- 
ful effort.  The  contrast  was  too  sharp  between  the  theo- 
ries of  our  most  loved  and  admired  masters,  and  the 
necessity  of  action  which  the  country's  disaster  laid, 
despite  ourselves,  upon  our  hearts ;  and  one,  at  least,  of 
the  two  great  writers  I  have  just  mentioned,  felt  this 
himself.  Had  not  M.  Taine  dreaded  the  paralyzing  influ- 
ence of  his  work,  would  he  have  devoted  his  mature 
age  to  those  exhaustive  studies  in  contemporary  history 
which  make  his  magnificent  last  work  the  political  brev- 
iary of  all  good  Frenchmen?  It  took  him  a  quarter- 
century  of  persistent  labour  to  effect  a  reconciliation 
between  Faith  and  Science,  between  civic  morals  and 
psychology,  between  the  fabric  of  his  philosophy  and 


THE   DAY   OF   KECKONING  6 

national  realities.  Such  a  problem  was  not  within  our 
scope  at  twenty  years  of  age.  We  saw,  on  the  one 
hand,  France  stricken  down.  We  felt  the  responsibility 
which  lay  upon  us  as  to  her  future  recovery  or  ruin. 
Recognizing  the  crisis,  we  desired  to  act.  On  the  other 
hand,  a  doctrine  of  despair,  impregnated  with  the  most 
nihilistic  determinism,  discouraged  us  in  advance.  The 
divorce  was  absolute  between  one's  intellect  and  one's 
emotional  nature.  Most  of  us,  if  we  will  look  back,  will 
perceive  that  the  task  of  our  youth  was  to  reconcile  a 
contradiction  from  which  there  are  those  who  suffer  even 
now,  although  life  has  brought  to  us  all  its  inevitable 
discipline  which  consists  in  making  us  accept  these 
inconsistencies  as  the  natural  condition  of  modern  souls, 
made  up  of  elements  too  incongruous  ever  to  be  entirely 
simplified. 

A  strange  youth  it  was  —  that  found  its  keenest  pleas- 
ures in  the  discussion  of  abstract  ideas  !  In  relating  an 
episode  of  this  period  it  has  seemed  to  me  needful  to 
give  its  moral  tonality  by  this  reference  to  the  conditions 
of  intellectual  anxiety  under  which  we  lived  in  our  youth. 
The  domestic  drama  which  I  am  about  to  relate  would  be, 
by  itself,  merely  an  incident  —  a  little  less  commonplace, 
perhaps,  than  most  incidents.  But  my  friend  who  was 
its  hero  —  and  its  victim  —  had,  in  a  very  high  degree, 
this  character  common  to  our  generation:  with  him, 
the  problems  of  daily  life  transformed  themselves  at 
once  into  problems  of  thought,  and  this  incident  became 


6  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

for  him  a  crisis  of  truly  tragic  responsibility.  Did  he 
take  a  very  lucid  view  of  the  situation  in  which  he 
found  himself  involved  ?  Or  did  he  give  to  events,  in 
themselves  peculiarly  sad,  an  altogether  arbitrary  sig- 
nificance, and  decide  in  the  direction  of  excessive  scru- 
pulousness a  question  certainly  very  painful  ?  I  myself 
—  a  troubled  looker-on  —  have  passed  through  two  very 
different  states  of  opinion  in  regard  to  my  friend  and  the 
decision  which  he  made.  At  the  time  when  these  events 
of  which  I  speak  took  place,  I  had  adopted  it  as  an 
indisputable  axiom  that  there  is  in  nature  no  trace  what- 
ever of  a  personal  will.  Hence,  I  had  no  faith  in  that 
secret  logic  of  chance  which  religious  people  call  Provi- 
dence, and  the  positivist  defines,  not  less  obscurely,  as 
immanent  justice.  The  tragedy  which,  to  my  friend's 
view,  revealed  an  avenging  power,  always  ready  to  reach 
the  criminal  through  the  unexpected  results  of  his  crime, 
to  me  was  one  of  the  innumerable  freaks  of  chance. 
Experience  has  now  shown  me  how  true  was  Napoleon's 
saying,  at  Saint  Helena,  "  Tout  se  paie  " ;  it  has  shown 
me  by  what  circuitous  paths  punisliment  follows  and 
overtakes  the  wrong-doing,  and  that  chance  is  usually 
only  an  unlooked-for  form  of  the  expiation.  I  incline, 
therefore,  to  believe  with  Eugene  Corbieres  —  this  was 
my  schoolmate's  name  —  that  the  drama  to  which  these 
over-long  reflections  are  a  prologue,  was  really  one  of 
those  payments  of  debt  in  which  the  Emperor  believed. 
This  one  was  obscure  and  humble.     Sometimes  they  are 


THE   DAY   OP   RECKONING  7 

conspicuous  and  resound  afar.  It  is  possible  that  the 
spirit  of  justice  which  governs  human  things  appears 
more  formidable  in  its  more  obscure  acts. 

I  have  said  that  Corbieres  was  my  schoolmate.  We 
had  known  each  other  at  the  lycee  Louis-le-Grand,  when 
we  were  both  day-scholars ;  but  our  acquaintance  was 
nothing  more  than  a  reason  for  tutoiement  We  had 
heard  the  same  lecturers,  learned  the  same  lessons,  put 
the  same  material  into  Latin  verse,  for  a  number  of  years, 
without  having  spoken  to  each  other,  except  to  say  "  good 
morning,"  and  "  good  night."  We  made  the  discovery 
of  each  other,  as  schoolmates  often  do,  after  we  were  out 
of  school,  and  after  having  entered  upon  paths  which 
were  widely  dissimilar.  But  we  both  brought  to  our 
respective  pursuits  —  in  themselves  so  different  that  one 
might  say  they  were  diametrically  opposite  —  that  same 
anxiety  as  to  the  problems  of  our  time,  that  same 
need  of  harmonizing  intellectual  determinism  with  civic 
action  which  seems  to  me  the  peculiar  characteristic 
of  our  generation.  It  was  in  the  spring  of  1873  that 
this  renewal  of  acquaintance  took  place,  as  the  result  of 
a  meeting  that  can  hardly  be  attributed  to  anything  but 
chance.  Its  least  details  are  present  to  my  mind  with 
extreme  precision.  I  was  coming  out  of  a  cafe,  now 
destroyed,  which  once  occupied  the  corner  of  the  rue 
de  Vaugirard,  opposite  the  Luxembourg  and  the  Oddon. 
Little  groups  of  young  writers,  now  dispersed,  were  accus- 
tomed to  meet  there,  who  had  the  ingenuous  whim  of 


8  THE   DAY   OF   BECKONING 

calling  themselves  the  "  Living  Ones."  I  felt  myself  a 
man  of  letters,  in  that  I  spent  several  hours  daily  in  the 
merry  and  paradoxical  society  of  these  amiable  compan- 
ions, who  left  the  deepest  part  of  my  intellect  unsatis- 
fied. They  were,  all  of  them,  literary  artists  exclusively, 
—  some  of  them  already  distinguished,  —  while  I,  even 
then,  cared  more  for  analysis  than  for  style  and  for 
psychology  than  for  aesthetics.  When  I  left  them,  I  was 
always  dissatisfied  with  myself  —  first,  because  I  had 
been  talking  instead  of  working,  and  further,  because 
the  feeling  of  their  personality,  too  opposite  to  mine, 
made  me  doubt  my  own. 

I  can  see  myself,  that  afternoon,  about  three  o'clock, 
entering  the  garden  of  the  Luxembourg,  and  walking 
along  the  avenue,  a  prey  to  that  melancholy  of  men- 
tal solitude  so  intense  with  the  young.  I  can  see 
Corbieres  coming  from  the  opposite  direction,  and 
accosting  me  with  one  of  those  cordial  smiles  which, 
in  the  case  of  old  schoolmates,  are  addressed  less  to 
the  individual  than  to  that  common  past  for  which 
one  has  already  begun  to  feel  some  faint  regret. 
Thereupon  we  begin  making  inquiries  of  each  other, 
as  we  walk  a  few  steps  together.  I  tell  Corbieres 
that  I  have  taken  up  literature.  He  tells  me  that 
he  has  taken  up  medicine,  and  in  the  course  of  this 
conversation,  which  might  easily  have  been  altogether 
superficial  in  its  character,  he  explains  to  me  this 
choice  of  a  career  by  motives  so  peculiar  and  so  much 


THE  DAY   OF   BECKONING  9 

like  my  own  habitual  turn  of  mind,  that,  on  the  moment, 
I  was  his  friend.  At  the  age  where  we  then  were, 
certain  resemblances  in  ways  of  thinking  are  equiva- 
lent to  years  of  intimacy. 

"  My  father  and  mother,"  he  said,  "  desired  to  have 
me  study  law  after  my  military  service.  My  father 
was,  for  thirty  years,  usher  at  the  Ministry  of  the 
Interior.  He  resigned  a  year  ago.  He  adores  the 
administration.  He  saw  me,  in  advance,  sub-prefect. 
I  should  be  of  his  own  type.  Fortunately,  he  is  very 
good  to  me,  and  so  is  my  mother.  If  I  will  always 
stay  with  them,  they  are  satisfied.  When  I  announced 
my  wish  to  study  medicine,  they  were  rather  surprised, 
of  course,  but  they  gave  their  consent.  I  alleged  as  a 
pretext  that  with  the  present  instability  in  political 
affairs,  civil  office  no  longer  offered  the  same  guarantees 
as  during  the  Empire.  My  true  reason  I  did  not  give. 
The  dear  old  people  have  no  other  philosophy  than 
that  of  the  heart.  They  would  not  have  understood 
my  point  of  view ;  but  you  will  understand.  What 
decided  me  to  follow  this  path  —  you  may  think  it 
singular  —  was  the  need  of  certainty.  My  personal 
taste  would  have  led  me  to  more  abstract  studies.  I 
should  have  entered  the  £cole  Normale,  and  pursued 
the  study  of  metaphysics,  but  I  had  read  Kant  and 
Taine's  V Intelligence,  and  it  appeared  to  me  that  the 
subject,  in  the  philosophic  sciences,  is  far  too  much 
beset  with   doubts.     My  mind  is,   I   may   say,   hungry 


10  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

and  thirsty  for  something  certain,  unquestionable.  The 
natural  sciences  give  this.  Then  I  reflected.  I  do 
not  know  how  you  stand  as  to  moral  convictions;  I 
myself  am  absolutely  an  agnostic.  It  is  my  opinion 
that  we  cannot  know  whether  there  is  a  God  —  to 
take  the  simplest  formula  —  or  not ;  whether  there  is 
Good  or  Evil,  or  not;  —  merit  or  demerit,  or  not;  —  a 
future  life,  or  not.  And  still  we  must  act.  I,  at 
least,  feel  obliged  to  act,  especially  since  the  war. 
I  feel  as  I  should  in  a  storm,  upon  a  vessel  that 
was  in  danger.  It  is  a  shame  not  to  be  of  use, 
if  you  can  be.  I  recalled  Pascal's  argument,  you 
remember,  of  the  wager.  I  said  to  myself,  which  is 
there  among  the  natural  sciences  that  is  capable  of  a 
practical  application  of  such  a  kind  that  under  any 
hypothesis  it  will  be  worth  while  ?  It  seemed  to  me 
that  medicine,  regarded  nobly,  ansAvered  to  this  pro- 
gramme. Look  at  it  from  either  point  of  view.  Sup- 
pose demonstrated  all  theories  of  a  soul  —  go  further, 
say  all  Christian  theories.  What  is  duty?  To  relieve 
suffering.  The  physician  does  this.  Suppose  all  the 
opposing  theories  demonstrated.  To  what,  then,  is 
morality  reduced  ?  To  an  altruistic  instinct  which 
must  be  recognized  and  gratified,  like  all  the  other 
instincts,  and  consists  in  a  need  of  associating  our- 
selves with  our  kind,  aiding  them  and  being  aided  by 
them  in  the  presence  of  hostile  nature.  Who  performs 
this    task   better    than    the    physician?      He    is,   par 


THE   DAY   OP   RECKONING  11 

excellence,  the  altruist.  He  is  right,  whatever  be  the 
metaphysical  postulate  that  we  adopt.  And  the  proof 
is,  that  since  I  was  first  matriculated  and  crossed 
the  threshold  of  the  hospital,  I  have  enjoyed  a  kind 
of  tranquillity  before  unknown.  I  have  had  the  evi- 
dence that,  mentally  and  morally,  my  feet  were  on 
solid  ground,  that  I  could  walk  safely.  Since  then,  I 
have  never  doubted  it." 

It  was  "V^ry  striking  to  look  at  Corbieres  while  he 
thus  spoke.  The  flame  of  thought  transfigured  his  irreg- 
ular and  rather  ugly  features.  This  son  of  a  petty 
employee  of  government  betrayed,  in  his  very  build, 
ra^at  half-peasant,  half-townsman  heredity  which  has 
neither  the  integrity  of  rustic  strength  nor  the  refine- 
ment of  the  true  city-bred  race.  He  had  big  bones 
and  small  muscles,  coarse  features  and  impoverished 
blood.  The  beauty  of  the  eyes  and  the  mouth  cor- 
rected the  paltriness  of  the  face.  It  was  a  mouth  of 
charming  goodness,  which  sMiled  with  free  ingenuous- 
ness, and  they  were  blue  eyes  of  such  loyalty  that  it 
seemed  impossible  that  the  man  who  looked  at  yoi^  like 
that  could  ever  lie.  Withal,  a  taking  voice,  in  which 
vibrated  the  ardour  of  inmost  conviction.  Does  it  need 
more,  to  explain  the  profound  impression  produced  upon 
me  by  what  he  said,  which  I  give  textually  as  he  said 
it?  I  wrote  it  down  that  very  evening  in  my  journal 
of  that  time,  with  many  other  details  needless  to  relate, 
in  which  I  find  indices  of  the  lightning  stroke  of  enthu- 


12  THE   DAY  OF  KECKONrNG 

siasm  that  struck  me  there,  under  the  leafy  trees  of 
the  old  garden.  I  imagine  —  I  hope  —  that  to-day,  as 
then,  those  peaceful  avenues,  along  which  stand  statues 
of  queens  and  busts  of  poets,  serve  as  the  theatre  for 
conversations  between  young  men,  of  the  same  high 
bent  with  this  one,  whose  remote  memory  I  recall. 
Hours  like  these  I  am  glad  to  remember,  from  an  ill- 
governed  youth;  these,  and,  with  them,  the  naive  plas- 
ticity of  soul  capable  of  noble  infatuations,  like  that 
which  made  me,  the  very  same  afternoon,  abandon  other 
plans  to  accompany  Eugene  to  his  home.  No  sooner 
were  we  there,  than  he  proposed,  in  turn,  to  go  home  with 
me.  It  was  after  dark  when  we  separated,  —  after 
having,  in  this  interminable  conversation,  touched  on 
all  subjects  of  human  thought,  —  and  agreed  to  meet  in 
the  morning.  I  was  to  accompany  my  comrade  to  the 
Pitie,  where  he  attended  the  clinic. 

"  I  believe,"  I  said  to  him,  grasping  his  hand,  "  that 
I  shall  do  as  you  have  done,  and  study  medicine." 

I  did  not  study  medicine,  and  this  sudden  resolution 
to  imitate  Corbieres  was  reduced  to  a  few  visits  to  the 
hospital,  which  had  at  least  the  good  effect  of  bringing 
me  into  the  presence  of  realities  —  a  contact  of  which 
I  had  most  need.  My ,  error,  which  was  that  of  so 
many  young  men  led  astray  by  a  precocious  ambition 
to  write,  consisted  in  making  literature  an  end,  while 
it  is  in  truth  only  a  result.  I  was  trying  to  compose 
romances,  and  I  had  observed  nothing;  poetry,  and  I 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  13 

had  experienced  nothing.  The  great  service  to  be  ren- 
dered me  was  to  draw  me  out  of  the  altogether  arti- 
ficial, bookish  surroundings  in  which  I  was  becoming 
more  and  more  enfeebled,  and  show  me  human  nature, 
simple  and  needy,  life,  humble  and  narrow,  but  true. 
This  service  Eugene  did  me  unconsciously,  and  in  two 
ways :  first,  by  these  salutary  visits  to  the  Pitie,  and 
then  by  giving  me  access  to  the  home  life  of  his  family, 
that  original  and  mysterious  home  life,  in  which,  for  a 
long  time,  I  saw  only  the  picturesque.  The  mystery 
was  visible  to  me  later. 

The  elder  Corbieres,  with  their  son,  lived  in  the 
third  story  of  a  very  old  house  in  a  very  old  street 
near  the  Pantheon.  This  street,  formerly  rue  du 
Puits-qui-parle  has  nothing  modern  about  it  except 
its  more  recent  name  of  rue  Amyot.  Not  a  house 
in  it  appears  to  have  changed  inmates  since  that 
remote  period  when  the  Scottish  and  Irish  colleges, 
of  which  the  frontal  inscriptions  remain  to  this  day, 
flourished  there  side  by  side.  In  my  occasional  pil- 
grimages thither,  I  still  find  the  place  exactly  as  it  was 
twenty-five  years  ago.  The  uneven  paving-stones,  over 
which  carriages  rarely  risk  themselves,  are  still  rimmed 
with  verdure,  as  in  some  little  country  town.  Branches 
of  trees  still  stretch  out  over  garden  walls ;  concierges 
still  hold  upon  the  sidewalk  long  sessions  of  open-air 
work  and  gossip  with  tenants  of  the  ground-floor ;  and 
children  play  ball  and  diable  without  having  to  fear  the 


14  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

abrupt  passage  of  vehicles.  The  irregular  houses,  of  dif- 
ferent dates  and  styles,  show  that  the  quarter  grew  like 
a  creation  of  nature,  slowly,  usefully,  as  it  was  needed, 
and  not  by  one  of  those  municipal  edicts  which  impress 
upon  new  Paris  a  stamp  of  universal  monotony.  No 
frame  was  more  appropriate  to  the  set,  rigid  faces  of 
my  friend's  parents.  The  retired  employee,  who  came 
himself  to  open  the  door  when  a  visitor  rang  the  bell, 
was  a  man  of  fifty-eight,  very  straight  and  very  thin, 
with  an  inexplicable  face  which  had  nothing  expressive 
in  it  except  the  eyes,  blue  like  his  son's,  but  with  a 
singular  brilliancy,  in  which  I  discern,  at  this  distance, 
the  hidden  fever  of  a  constant  remorse.  At  that  time 
I  was  disposed  to  see  in  it  only  the  ardour  of  a  paternal 
idolatry  of  which  I  have  never  seen  a  second  example. 
This  worthy  old  fellow,  whose  life  had  been  spent  — 
in  an  anteroom  in  the  place  Beauvau,  in  a  chimney- 
corner  heated  at  the  expense  of  the  tax-payers  —  in 
making  petitioners  endure  delays,  seemed  to  have  found 
in  his  son  all  the  compensations  of  his  wearisome  exist- 
ence. To  judge  by  the  humble  apartment,  the  simple 
furniture,  the  dress  of  both  father  «,nd  mother,  the 
resources  of  the  household  must  have  been  extremely 
slender.  And  yet  never  had  a  book  been  refused  to 
Eugene  for  his  studies,  and  never  had  the  father  been 
willing  that  the  student  of  medicine  should  be  distracted 
from  his  studies  for  an  hour  to  give  a  lesson,  to  write 
for  some  little  newspaper,  —  in  a  word,  to  earn  money 


THE    DAY   OF   llECKONING  15 

in  any  way.  The  intensity  of  his  affection  made  him 
comprehend  that  for  a  future  savant  the  years  of  youth 
have  triple  value,  and  that  the  entire  command  of  one's 
time  during  that  period  is  the  most  precious  of  ad- 
vantages. 

"1  say  to  Eugene,"  he  would  often  repeat,  "'Don't 
think  of  us.  Our  happiness  is  to  be  with  you.'  I 
should  not  be  a  Picard  si  je  n'appendais  pas  avec  mon 
Jieu."  He  had  retained  from  his  native  place,  which 
was  Peronne,  some  patois  phrases  that  he  loved  to 
use,  with  a  pretence  of  being  a  peasant.  "He  must 
become  a  famous  man,"  he  would  add;  "and  he  will. 
I  have  always  thought  so,  ever  since  he  was  in  school, 
monsieur.  See  his  prizes !  There  are  eighty-seven 
volumes." 

And  with  a  hand  callous  from  his  humble  labours, 
the  father  pointed  out  to  me  the  rows  of  books  in  a 
mahogany  bookcase  with  glass  doors  securely  locked. 
All  the  story  of  his  devotion  to  his  son  clung  about 
those  miserable  prize  volumes,  which  the  old  man  would 
sometimes  call  —  0  simplicity!  —  his  "patents  of  nobil- 
ity." You  can  trace  the  steps  of  the  boy's  progress : 
the  child  goes  to  the  clerical  school  of  the  neighbour- 
hood; he  is  intelligent,  he  learns  rapidly.  "It  would 
be  a  pity  that  he  should  not  go  on,"  says  the  Superior. 
The  parents  consult  together.  '^Bah!  we  can  do  with 
less  tobacco  and  sugar.  We  can  dispense  with  the  char- 
woman."    The  boy  is  sent  to  the  lyc^e  near  by.     He 


16  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

does  well.  It  had  been  intended  to  take  him  away 
after  the  fourth  year  and  the  examination  in  grammar. 
Then  comes  his  success  at  the  concours.  He  must  go  on, 
as  far  as  the  baccalaureate.  The  rest  follows.  Habits 
of  the  severest  economy  were  manifest  by  many  signs  in 
the  household.  Of  course  it  was  the  father  who  under- 
took the  heavier  work  —  polishing  the  floors,  rubbing  the 
furniture,  chopping  wood,  emptying  water,  even  mak- 
ing the  beds.  He  had  evidently  given  up  his  place 
at  the  office  that  his  son  might  be  better  served.  His 
red  face  had  a  skin  honeycombed,  as  it  were,  with  wide 
wrinkles,  of  which  each  one  bore  witness  to  the  endur- 
ance, the  persistency,  of  a  rude  and  substantial  race. 
An  extreme  neatness  —  also  a  trait  of  his  native  coun- 
try, on  the  confines  of  Flanders  —  prevailed  in  the  six 
rooms  that  composed  the  apartment,  namely :  a  kitchen, 
an  entry,  the  bedroom  of  the  parents,  a  dining  room, 
a  parlour,  which  quickly  became  Eugene's  study,  and 
the  son's  bedroom.  Thus  the  student  had  the  occu- 
pancy of  more  than  a  third  of  the  humble  suite,  and, 
as  a  matter  of  course,  the  portion  that  was  the  largest  and 
most  airy,  with  windows  looking  out  into  gardens,  and 
also  the  only  part  that  was  almost  luxuriously  furnished. 
My  comrade  accepted  all  that  was  done  for  him  partly, 
it  must  be  owned,  with  the  egoism  natural  to  those  who 
are  working  hard,  but  chiefly,  with  the  idea  that  his 
future  was  preparing  an  ample  compensation  for  his  par- 
ents' present  sacrifices.     How  often  have  I  heard  him  say, 


THE   DAY   OF    EECKONING  17 

when  I  tried  to  drag  him  off  on  some  excursion  or  to 
some  place  of  amusement :  "  I  cannot.  I  must  think  of 
my  old  people." 

I  knew  well  enough  that  his  "  old  people,"  as  he  called 
them,  with  loving  familiarity,  would  never  have  said  a 
word  of  blame  to  him,  in  whatever  way  he  might  have 
spent  his  afternoon  or  evening.  No.  What  he  meant  by 
that  was  the  expression  of  his  own  passionate  desire  to 
merit  their  admirable  devotion.  And  he  was  all  the  more 
industrious,  because  he  suspected  in  them  a  strange  apti- 
tude for  suffering.  It  was  very  true,  this  most  excellent 
couple  did  not  seem  to  live  in  that  atmosphere  of  cheer- 
fulness of  which  their  devotion,  prolonged  through  so 
many  years,  rendered  them  worthy.  On  the  reddened 
forehead  of  the  father,  where  projecting  veins  marked  in 
the  temples  the  strong  current  of  the  blood,  there  seemed 
to  weigh  a  constant  anxiety.  Did  he  fear  that  he  might 
die  before  his  work  was  finished,  before  he  had  seen  his 
son  a  graduate,  a  professor  in  the  Faculty  of  Medicine,  a 
member  of  the  Academy  ?  —  Had  he  spent  all  his  savings 
in  this  long  and  costly  education,  and  was  his  little  pen- 
sion from  government,  which  would  cease  with  his  life, 
the  main  portion  of  his  present  means  ?  — Was  he  merely 
a  man  of  melancholy  disposition,  saddened  by  his  wife's 
feeble  health?  These  were  questions  that  the  son  no 
doubt  asked  himself,  as  I  asked  myself,  whenever  I  noticed, 
during  my  visits,  traces  upon  the  father's  face  of  this  mys- 
terious gloom.     In  the  case  of  Madame  Corbi^res,  the 


18  THE  DAY   OF  RECKONING 

answer  was  simple,  or  at  least  it  appeared  so  to  me. 
Eugene  had  too  often  spoken  to  me  himself  of  his  fears  as 
to  his  mother's  health.  He  believed  her  threatened  with 
some  disease  of  the  liver.  She  was  a  short,  thick-set  per- 
son, who  must,  at  twenty,  have  been  a  handsome  girl,  with 
that  beauty  of  the  southern  mountaineers,  at  once  light 
and  sturdy,  in  which  there  is  so  much  vitality  packed,  as 
it  were,  crowded,  into  a  little  figure.  She  was  from  La 
Roquebrussane,  a  village  of  Var,  perched  on  a  spur  of 
the  Maures,  between  Brignoles  and  Toulon.  She  had 
the  pretty  feet  and  small  hands  of  the  Provencal  women 
—  real  slipper-feet,  straight  and  slender,  able  to  climb, 
at  fifty  and  over,  without  a  stumble,  the  steep  sides  of 
her  native  hills,  —  hands,  thin  and  agile  as  an  olive- 
picker's  should  be.  And  what  a  black  flame  in  her  eyes ! 
They  seemed  literally  to  burn  in  her  thin  and  sallow 
face.  Although  this  woman  always  received  me  with 
extreme  courtesy  of  manner,  why  did  I  never  feel  at  ease 
with  her  ?  There  was,  in  her  whole  being,  a  something 
shy  and,  as  it  were,  defiant,  which  even  her  son's  pres- 
ence did  not  appease,  did  not  smooth  away  completely. 

"She  is  not  a  soul  at  peace,"  Eugene  once  said  to  me, 
when  I  inquired  about  her.  "If  I  believed  in  a  God, 
it  is  something  would  make  me  doubt  His  justice.  You 
know  my  mother.  You  see  what  her  life  is.  From  my 
earliest  infancy,  I  remember  her  as  a  person  who  has  lived 
only  for  others — for  us  two,  my  father  and  me.  With  her 
marketing,  her  cooking,  the  care  of  our  clothing,  her  life 


THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING  19 

has  been  spent  in  the  humblest  duties  of  the  humblest  of 
servants,  and  she  was  born  a  lady  and  has  had  some 
education!  If  any  person  deserves  to  have  peace  of 
heart,  certainly  it  is  she :  and  she  does  not  have  it.  She 
is  religious,  devout  even ;  and  she  uses  her  religion  only 
to  torture  herself  with  scruples.  Feeble  as  she  is,  every 
Lent  I  expect  to  see  her  fall  ill,  and  there  is  no  way  to  pre- 
vent her  excessive  austerities.  I  should  have  spoken  to 
her  confessor,  but  I  don't  know  who  he  is.  She  is  very 
secretive  on  some  points,  especially  on  that  one ;  and  if 
one  ventures  to  question  her,  even  I,  it  is  evident  that  it 
causes  her  pain.  They  talk  to  us  of  a  good  conscience. 
It  is  a  good  stomach  and  a  good  liver  that  we  need.  At 
each  digestive  period,  the  liver  fills  with  blood.  Let  this 
blood,  by  some  accident,  be  loaded  with  irritants  for  the 
hepatic  cells,  and  the  whole  moral  being  is  physically 
poisoned." 

"  But,"  I  said,  "  are  there  not  also  cases  where  grief 
kills,  —  that  is  to  say,  where  the  physical  being  is  mor- 
ally poisoned  ?  " 

"  Perfectly  true,"  he  rejoined ;  "  and  this  completes  the 
proof  that  we  know  nothing  about  anything.  And  still, 
we  do.  I  know  that  on  the  day  when  my  good  mother 
sees  me  a  graduate,  that  success  will  be  more  useful  to 
her  than  all  the  water  of  Carlsbad  or  Marienbad.  And 
so  I  will  leave  you  and  go  to  work." 


20  THE  DAY   OF  BECKONING 


II 


I  HAVE  lingered  over  these  reminiscences,  of  which  I 
could  multiply  details.     They  sum  up  the  impressions  of 
many  years  —  years  extending  from  the  spring  of  1873, 
•when  I  renewed  with  Eugene  Corbieres  the  acquaintance 
begun  at  school,  to  the  winter  of  1882,  when  occurred 
the  events  I  have  to  relate,  which  are  the  real  subject  of 
the  story ;  —  incoherent  years  for  me,  spending  them,  as 
I  did,  and  as  most  apprentice-authors  do,  in  all  sorts  of 
unfruitful  attempts  and  unwise  experiments,  more  or  less 
dangerous  for  my  intellectual  future :  fruitful  and  well- 
ordered  years  for  my  friend,  who  had  made  his  way  at 
once.    I  saw  him,  successively,  assistant,  then  house-sur- 
geon in  the  hospital  and  winner  of  the  gold  medal,  then 
doctor,   and  he  was   approaching  steadily  toward  that 
position  of  hospital-doctor  and  title  of  associate,  which  he 
had  made  the  object  of  his  ambition.     The  divergence  of 
our  pursuits  had  been  too  great  to  make  daily  relations 
possible  for  us  all  through  this   period.     We  had  had, 
therefore,  during  these  nine  years,  merely  one  of  those 
intermittent  intimacies  which  do  not   give  opportunity 
to  observe  certain  slight  changes  in  the  domestic  life  of 
those  whom  we  thus  meet  from  time  to  time.     At  each 
of  my  visits  in  the  rue  Amyot  I  had  found  the  situation 
very  much  the  same,  —  the  father  a  little  redder  in  col- 
ouring and  a  little  less  active,  the  mother  a  little  more 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  21 

leaden  of  face  and  more  settled  down  in  figure.  But  noth- 
ing in  their  way  of  living  had  changed.  When  I  arrived  it 
was  always  the  old  man  who  answered  the  bell,  usually 
in  shirt  sleeves,  a  scrubbing-brush  in  hand,  or  a  broom 
or  a  duster ;  and  through  the  half-open  door  into  the 
kitchen,  I  could  see  the  mother  at  her  stove,  preparing 
some  southern  dainty  —  a  rizot  or  a  fish  soup  —  for  the 
evening  meal  of  the  patient  day-labourer  of  Science 
whom  I  found  at  his  table  surrounded  by  his  papers  and 
his  books,  arranging  his  notes  of  the  day  or  day  before. 
Although  he  now  began  to  be  called  in  by  his  instructors 
for  profitable  consultations,  and  did  some  work  for  medi- 
cal journals  for  which  he  was  suitably  paid,  scarcely 
did  his  "old  people"  tolerate  the  intrusion  into  their 
household  of  a  charwoman  at  five  cents  an  hour,  who 
came  only  for  part  of  the  morning. 

"I  no  longer  insist,"  said  Corbieres,  explaining  to 
me  the  situation.  "  If  either  of  them  were  to  be  really 
ill,  I  should  at  once  employ  a  regular  servant.  Mean- 
time I  am  afraid,  if  I  should  interfere  with  their  mode 
of  life,  even  a  little,  it  might  derange  their  health. 
My  mother  especially  could  not  endure  being  thwarted. 
You  know  my  former  anxieties  about  her.  I  see  that 
she  worries  still,  and  about  everything.  My  father 
feels  the  effect.  They  succeed  in  making  themselves 
unhappy,  such  good  people  as  they  are!  No,  certainly, 
there  is  no  Providence." 

At  the  beginning  of    the  year  1882,  the   situation 


22  THE   DAY   OF    RECKONING 

however,  underwent  a  change.  Eugene  had  mani- 
fested a  desire  to  leave  the  rue  Amyot,  alleging  the 
necessity  of  establishing  himself  more  suitably.  Then 
followed  the  first  serious  disagreement  between  the 
son  and  his  parents.  After  having  approved  of  his 
decision,  and  aided  him  in  his  search  for  a  new  abode, 
and  superintended  its  being  made  ready  for  him, 
the  father  and  mother  suddenly  declared  that  they 
could  not  think  of  leaving  the  place  in  which  they 
had  lived  for  over  thirty  years ;  and  their  determina- 
tion was  invincible.  In  the  light  of  the  facts  which 
I  came  to  know  later,  I  now  see  that  this  resolve  of 
the  old  people  contained  an  idea  of  expiation  sug- 
gested by  the  mother.  But  in  ignorance  of  the  wrong- 
doing whose  secret  shame  weighed  upon  this  husband 
and  wife,  how  explain  this  obstinacy  except  as  a 
form  of  mania?  This  the  physician  did  not  fail  to 
do.  But  already  the  suspicion  that  his  parents'  mental 
state  concealed  a  mystery,  had  begun  vaguely  to  dawn 
in  his  mind.  He  perceived  in  them  a  determination 
to  have  no  share  in  the  comfort  of  which  his  situation 
would  henceforth  admit.  Almost  without  effort  on  his 
part,  and  without  interruption  of  his  work  for  the 
examinations,  the  preceding  year  had  brought  hira  in 
more  than  two  thousand  dollars  —  an  enormous  sum 
for  ways  of  living  so  simple  as  theirs.  He  came  to 
see  me,  I  remember,  after  his  last  attempt  to  persuade 
his  parents,   and   related  to  me    the    conversation    he 


THE  DAY   OF  KECKONING  23 

had  had  with  them,  —  his  own  urgency  and  their  more 
and  more  positive  refusal. 

"  There  is  some  kind  of  mania  in  their  case,  with- 
out doubt,"  he  said.  "  But  I  also  see,  on  my  mother's 
part,  a  religious  idea.  It  is  her  way  of  wearing  sack- 
cloth, I  think.  She  gives  me  the  impression  of  wishing 
to  punish  herself.  But  for  what  ?  Poor  saint !  It 
can  only  be  for  having  loved  me  too  well,  for  having 
been  too  proud  of  me.  What  I  wonder  at  most  is 
that  she  can  persuade  my  father  to  take  the  same 
view.  He  is  not  at  all  pious.  He  goes  to  mass  but 
seldom  now,  and  when  I  was  a  child  he  never  went. 
What  arguments  does  she  use  to  persuade  him  ?  And 
he  is  growing  old,  he  needs  rest,  and  to  be  better 
fed,  better  lodged,  better  served.  And  there  is  no 
way  of  bringing  these  old  heads  to  reason.  It  is  past 
comprehension ! " 

And  so  indeed  it  was.  But  why  was  it  that  this 
eccentricity  of  the  old  man  and  his  wife  did  not 
surprise  me  beyond  all  measure  ?  Is  there,  in  that 
sum  of  vague  impressions  which  the  personality  of 
another  gives  us,  a  hidden  logic,  whose  unexpressed 
intuitions  go  beyond  our  own  knowledge?  I  should 
have  been  incapable  of  explaining  why  this  attitude 
of  the  parents  of  Eugene  coincided  with  the  idea  of 
them  which  I  had  in  the  depths  of  my  consciousness. 
What  an  unlikely  thing  it  was,  however,  this  sudden 
effacement  of  a  father  and  mother  who  had  lived  only 


24  THE   DAY   OP   RECKONING 

for  their  son,  in  the  presence  of  this  son's  success ! 
What  an  anomaly,  thus  to  renounce  the  daily  joy 
of  sharing  his  triumph,  which  was  their  own  work  ! 
I  had  seen  them  for  ten  years  living  and  breathing 
with  no  other  aim  than  to  secure  to  their  son  leisure 
to  follow  his  chosen  career,  to  prepare  for  his  exami- 
nations, to  become  the  distinguished  doctor  that  he 
was  destined  to  be  —  that  he  already  was ;  and  now 
they  refused  to  take  any  share  in  this  fulfilment  of 
the  passionate  desire  of  their  lives.  Was  it  that  they 
judged  themselves  too  low-born,  too  ill-bred  ?  Did  they 
foresee  that  their  son  would  marry  into  a  world  above 
their  own,  and  were  they  making  the  final  separation 
from  him  in  advance  ?  Some  of  these  hypotheses 
seemed  probable,  others  not.  The  only  thing  of  which 
I  had  not  thought  was  that  these  people  had  com- 
mitted a  deed  for  which  they  could  not  forgive  them- 
selves. How  could  I  imagine  that  regret  for  this  act 
weighed  upon  their  declining  years  with  a  weight  all 
the  more  heavy  (and  upon  this  point  Eugene  did  not 
deceive  himself)  because  Mme.  Corbieres,  with  her 
half-Italian  religion,  terrified  herself  and  terrified  her 
husband  with  the  idea  of  approaching  death  and  sure 
perdition?  And  indeed  when  I  think  of  the  succes- 
sion of  slight  occurrences  which  unveiled  to  the  son 
this  abyss  of  misery,  I  repeat  it,  I  cannot  but  see  in 
them  myself  that  punishment  which  the  mother  dreaded ; 
and  I  think  of  the  strange  proverb  in  which  the  Italians 


THE   DAY   OF    RECKONING  26 

—  those  cousins  by  blood  of  the  Provenqaux  —  depict, 
with  their  vivid  imagination,  this  return  of  the  crime 
upon  him  who  has  committed  it :  " La  saetta  gira,  gira" 
they  say,  "  the  arrow  turns  —  torna  adosso  a  dii  la 
tira,  and  strikes  him  who  shot  it." 

Something  like  a  month  had  passed  since  Eugene 
had  lamented  to  me,  in  the  language  I  have  related, 
the  persistence  of  his  parents  in  refusing  to  share  his 
new  home.  I  had  not  again  seen  him  since  that  day, 
which,  however,  was  no  surprise  to  me,  knowing  as  I 
did  the  engrossing  character  of  his  pursuits.  I  never 
suspected  that,  during  these  four  weeks,  his  mind  had 
been  occupied  with  something  very  different  from  dis- 
eases of  malnutrition,  —  his  favourite  object  of  study,  — 
and  that  he  had  entered,  almost  against  his  will,  upon 
an  investigation  from  which  he  would  perhaps  have 
shrunk  back  if  he  could  have  foreseen  its  result.  But 
no ;  his  was  one  of  those  virile  minds  —  some  there 
are,  even  in  his  profession  —  in  which  no  feeling  can 
overpower  the  brave  desire  to  have  the  truth  at  all 
times,  no  matter  how  harsh  it  may  be.  I  can  see  him 
now,  as  he  came  to  my  room,  after  these  four  weeks 
had  passed,  one  morning  shortly  after  eleven  o'clock. 
It  was  inconvenient  for  him  to  leave  his  work  at  that 
hour,  and  the  very  fact  that  he  had  done  so  showed  that 
something  unusual  had  occurred.  The  expression  of  his 
face  also  showed  this,  even  more  plainly  —  a  certain 
agitation  which  he  could  not  conceal,  and  in  his  eyes, 


26  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

usually  so  candid  and  so  full  of  the  beautiful  clear  light 
of  study,  something  like  an  imploring  anguish,  as  of 
one  about  to  venture  upon  a  step  which  he  could  not 
bear  even  to  have  discussed.  He  made  no  preface  to 
"what  he  had  to  say,  but  with  true  surgical  decision 
came  at  once  to  the  point :  — 

"  I  want  to  ask  you  to  do  me  a  very  delicate  service. 
I  will  say  in  advance  that,  if  you  are  not  willing,  I 
shall  not  be  offended.  I  only  beg  you  to  reflect  before 
saying  no." 

"  I  promise  you  that  I  will  say  yes,  if  it  is  possible 
for  me  to  do  so,"  I  replied,  in  the  same  grave  tone 
as  his  own.  Knowing  his  distaste  for  all  parade, 
I  felt  from  his  manner  of  opening  the  subject  that 
there  was  some  fixed  resolve  in  his  mind,  and  I  esteemed 
him  too  highly  not  to  place  myself  at  once  on  his  own 
level  of  seriousness. 

"Thank  you,"  he  said,  as  he  grasped  my  hand. 
Then,  without  other  preamble,  he  continued:  "I  have 
told  you  how  persistently  my  parents  refuse  to  live 
with  me.  And  I  have  also  told  you  that  this  refusal 
is  merely  part  of  a  general  determination  to  make  no 
change  in  their  way  of  living,  now  that  they  can  do 
this  and  ought  to  do  it.  It  seems  as  if  they  felt  that 
in  sharing  my  life  henceforward  they  would  be  shar- 
ing in  ill-gotten  wealth ;  and  yet,  all  that  I  have,  all 
that  I  ever  shall  have  in  the  world,  is  the  result  of 
my  own  labour  and  of  theirs.      It  is  they  who,   by 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  27 

their  sacrifices,  made  me  what  I  am.  Of  this  you  are 
a  witness.  I  had  my  time  for  myself,  all  my  time 
I  was  absolutely  free  to  work  to  the  best  advantage ; 
and  this  was  so,  solely  because  they  made  it  possible 
for  me,  by  their  devotion,  every  hour  in  the  day  and 
every  day  in  the  year,  from  my  boyhood  until  now. 
And  I  accepted  this  devotion,  but  only  with  the  hope, 
with  the  certainty,  of  making  their  old  age  happy  and 
comfortable.  This  they  now  deny  me  —  this  poor- 
pleasure,  the  expectation  of  which  alone  justified  me 
to  myself  in   receiving  from  them  so  much." 

"Do  not  give  way  to  that  feeling,"  I  said;  "it  is 
worthy  neither  of  you  nor  of  them.  There  are  hearts 
toward  whom  it  is  ungrateful  to  seek  to  show  gratitude. 
One  must  take  what  they  give  you  as  they  give  it, 
freely.     One  pays  them  by  loving  them." 

"  It  is  because  I  do  love  them,"  he  said,  "  and  because 
I  know  how  much  they  love  me,  that  their  attitude 
toward  me  tortures  me.  You  remember  I  believed  there 
was  some  mania  in  their  case.  I  had  the  idea  that 
especially  my  mother,  a  southern  Catholic  in  her  reli- 
gion, might  be  swayed  by  some  ghost  of  a  scruple.  Well, 
during  this  month  since  I  saw  you  last,  I  have  ceased 
to  argue  with  them  this  question  —  which  ought  to  be 
so  simple,  don't  you  think  so  ?  I  have  gone  to  live  in 
my  apartment  in  the  rue  Bonaparte,  keeping  their  room 
always  ready  for  them.  And,  in  spite  of  myself,  I  have 
begun  to  look  at  them,  since  then.     You  are  surprised  at 


28  THE   DAY   OP   RECKONING 

my  saying  this,  because  I  have  always  beeu  with  them. 
But  it  is  the  fact,  however.  Except  at  the  time  when  I 
feared  for  my  mother  a  beginning  of  hepatitis,  I  had 
never  before  used  toward  them  that  acuteness  of  observa- 
tion which  is  developed  in  us  by  our  profession.  It  was 
as  if  the  son  in  me  were  suddenly  removed  to  give  place 
to  the  medical  man.  It  is  extremely  difficult  for  me  to 
explain  to  you  a  state  which  doubtless  is  absolutely 
peculiar.  I  can  make  you  understand  it,  however,  in 
this  way:  if  the  professional  faculty  were  not  at  mo- 
ments asleep,  as  it  were,  within  us,  no  physician  would 
ever  be  a  lover ;  and  if,  on  the  other  hand,  this  faculty, 
awakened,  did  not  dominate  the  whole  man,  no  fair 
patient  would  be  safe  with  her  doctor.  I  know  no 
example  that  better  shows  this  division  into  two,  of 
which  our  technical  education  renders  us  capable.  I 
ascertained  then,  in  the  course  of  this  close  analysis,  that 
my  parents  were  both  more  impaired  in  health  than  I 
had  heretofore  noticed,  and  each  one  in  the  way  indi- 
cated by  the  temperament  of  each.  He  is  in  danger  of 
Bright's  disease;  she,  of  disease  of  the  liver.  But  let 
that  pass ;  I  spare  you  the  details  of  an  investigation 
which  is  connected  with  what  I  have  to  ask  you  only 
by  its  result,  which  is  this :  I  became  convinced  that 
there  has  been  in  their  minds  a  hidden  cause  of  anxiety 
which  I  had  never  suspected  —  " 

"  An  anxiety  of  which  you  were  not  the  object  ?  " 
I  interrupted.  "I  have  observed  them,  too  —  these 
poor  parents  of  yours.     It  is  not  possible  —  " 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  29 

"  Listen  to  me ! "  lie  broke  in  impatiently.  "  A  week 
ago,  coming  out  of  the  hospital,  —  I  am  acting  as  substi- 
tute at  the  Hotel-Dieu,  —  these  ideas  were  distressing 
me  more  than  usual.  The  evening  before,  mamma  had 
been  looking  unusually  worried  when  I  left  her.  My 
duties  at  the  hospital  had  been  over  sooner  than  I 
expected.  It  occurred  to  me  that  I  had  time  to  go  over 
to  the  rue  Amyot  and  see  how  she  was.  I  reached  the 
house.  I  went  up  the  three  flights  of  stairs.  On  the 
landing,  just  as  I  was  about  to  give  the  double  ring,  by 
which  for  more  than  twenty  years  I  have  been  accus- 
tomed to  announce  myself,  I  heard  loud  talking  from 
inside.  It  seemed  as  if  there  were  a  quarrel  going  on. 
It  was  not  possible  to  distinguish  the  words,  but  I  recog- 
nized a  voice  —  my  father's.  The  other  was  unknown  to 
me.  For  a  moment  I  listened,  catching  only  fragments  of 
sentences,  among  them  this  exclamation  by  my  father, 
twice  over :  '  But  it  is  a  shame,  it  is  a  shame ! '  Suddenly 
the  thought  that,  if  the  door  opened,  I  should  be  detected, 
by  him  or  my  mother,  playing  the  spy,  led  me  to  grasp 
the  bell  handle.  At  the  double  ring,  which  made  known 
that  it  was  I,  the  voices  ceased.  My  father's  step  ap- 
proached. I  was  at  one  of  those  moments  when  the 
nervous  machine  is  so  strained  that  it  registers  the 
smallest  signs.  Merely  by  the  creaking  of  the  floor  under 
his  feet  I  should  have  known  that  my  father  trembled. 
I  should  have  known  it  also  by  the  way  he  fumbled  with 
the  key,  turning  it  again  and  again  before  opening  the 


30  THE  DAY  OF   RECKONING 

door.  He  was  so  disconcerted  that  he  could  hardly  find 
words  to  answer  my  question :  '  You  have  some  one 
with  you  ?  Do  I  interrupt  you  ?  '  —  '  Not  at  all/  he 
said,  and  then  he  went  on :  '  Mamma  is  not  in.  But 
if  you  will  wait  a  minute,  I  shall  be  at  liberty,  and  will 
come  to  you.'  He  did  not  wish  me  to  see  the  person 
with  whom  he  had  been  having  this  violent  altercation. 
That  person,  however,  wished  to  see  me;  for,  at  the 
moment  my  father  opened  the  door  to  show  me  into  the 
dining  room,  the  door  of  the  kitchen,  into  which  he  had 
pushed  his  visitor,  was  thrown  wide.  The  same  voice 
which  I  had  heard  quarrelling  with  my  father  said: 
'  Monsieur  Corbieres,  I  will  not  inconvenience  you ;  I 
will  return  for  that  little  matter ; '  and,  at  the  same  mo- 
ment I  saw  a  man  appear,  of  about  our  age,  with  rather 
good  features  in  a  horribly  worn  face,  with  sharp  shoul- 
ders and  an  emaciated  form  very  shabbily  clothed.  You 
know  how  they  look,  those  old  clothes  of  the  profes- 
sional beggar,  to  whom  our  worn-out  coats  and  trousers 
and  hats  fall,  in  the  end.  This  man  reeked  of  liquor  and 
tobacco,  and  he  had  in  his  eyes,  with  their  reddened 
lids,  that  brutish  and  insolent  look  one  sees  so  often  in 
people  of  his  kind —  a  mingled  pride  and  stupidity  which 
announces  general  paralysis  close  at  hand.  He  stared 
at  me,  repeating,  'I  shall  come  again,'  and  went  out, 
shuffling  over  the  floor  in  his  ragged  shoes  with  an 
arrogant  gait." 

"  It  is  some  poor  wretch  to  whom  your  excellent  father 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  31 

is  giving  money,"  I  said,  "  that  is  all.  It  would  be  wiser 
for  him  not  to  receive  such  individuals  when  he  is  alone, 
it  is  true.  But  these  beggars  are  organized  here,  as  they 
are  in  Naples,  in  camorre.  They  give  each  other  infor- 
mation, and  this  one  knows  that  M.  Corbieres  is  not  very 
rich,  you  may  be  sure  —  " 

"Yes,"  Eugene  rejoined;  "it  was  a  beggar,  without 
doubt.     But  he  was  not  merely  a  beggar." 

"  What  do  you  mean  to  say  ?  " 

"  I  mean  to  say  that,  in  the  tone  of  his  voice,  while  I 
listened  outside  the  door,  in  his  manner  of  leaving  the 
house,  in  his  way  of  saying,  *  I  shall  return,'  there  was 
something  threatening,  almost  authoritative.  And  if  he 
had  been  a  mere  beggar,  would  my  father  have  been  so 
disturbed  by  my  arrival  ?  Would  he  have  evaded  my 
questions  when  we  were  together  ?  Would  he  have 
asked  me  not  to  mention  the  subject  to  my  mother  ? " 

"  Why,  certainly,"  I  replied.  "  It  is  all  explained  if 
you  suppose  merely  that  this  is  some  worthless  wretch  to 
whom  your  mother,  more  wisely,  refuses  charity,  and 
who  makes  his  way  in  when  she  is  absent,  to  secure  a 
handful  of  sous  from  the  compassion  of  M.  Corbieres." 

"  You  have  not  seen  that  man  and  my  father  face  to 
face,"  Eugene  answered.  "  I,  having  seen  them,  feel  a 
mystery,  just  as  positively  as  I  feel  that  fire."  And  he 
extended  a  hand  toward  the  flame  which,  yellow  and 
supple,  blazed  upon  the  hearth.  "I  felt  it,"  he  con- 
tinued, "  to  the  degree  that  I  allowed  myself  to  be  drawn, 


32  THE  DAY   OF   KECKONINQ 

under  the  influence  of  that  feeling,  into  doing  an  incredi- 
ble thing.  When  I  had  reached  the  house,  I  had  sent 
away  my  fiacre,  intending  to  walk  to  the  £coIe  Pratique 
after  seeing  my  parents.  As  chance  would  have  it,  in 
going  away  from  the  rue  Amyot,  I  went  by  the  rue  de 
la  Vielle-Estrapade,  and  thence  by  the  rue  Saint-Jacques. 
Perhaps  you  may  remember  that  before  you  reach  the 
rue  Soufflot  there  is  on  the  left  a  kind  of  tavern,  a 
drinking  shop  rather,  with  a  frontage  of  barrels  and 
unpainted  wooden  tables.  It  is  not  a  wine  dealer's,  and 
it  is  not  a  cafe.  The  men  who  frequent  the  place  are 
not  the  customers  of  a  wine  dealer  or  the  patrons  of  a 
caf^.  There  are  a  few  workmen  who  go  there,  a  very  few, 
but  especially  you  will  see  there  men  who  are  losing 
caste :  teachers  who  have  no  school,  painters  without  a 
studio,  political  writers  without  a  newspaper,  poets  with- 
out a  publisher,  prospective  lawyers  without  cases,  medi- 
cal students  whose  names  are  nowhere  registered.  The 
favourite  drink  of  the  place  is  absinthe.  I  never  go  past 
it  without  glancing  in,  almost  in  spite  of  myself.  Now 
and  then  I  have  dragged  out  of  this  place  some  old 
fellow-student.  I  looked  in  this  morning,  and  I  recog- 
nized, leaning  on  his  elbows  at  a  table  in  the  back  of 
the  shop,  with  a  glass  before  him  of  the  vile,  greenish, 
milky  drug,  the  mysterious  rascal  whom  I  had  just  met 
at  my  father's.  As  I  stood  still,  struck  motionless  by 
curiosity,  he  lifted  his  head  and  looked  in  my  direction. 
I  drew  back,  like  a  criminal  caught  in  the  act,  and  hid 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  33 

myself  behind  the  awning  of  an  adjacent  shop.  It  was 
labour  wasted.  The  fellow  was  already  completely  in- 
toxicated and  incapable  of  recalling  my  face.  His  struck 
me  now  more  gloomily  than  before,  because  of  the  con- 
trast behind  the  haggard  stupor  of  intoxication  and  the 
refinement  of  features  of  which  I  told  you.  There  are 
two  very  distinct  types  of  drunkards :  the  brutal  and  — 
if  one  may  employ  such  a  word  for  such  degradation  — 
the  refined.  There  is  the  man  who  drinks  from  coarse- 
ness of  nature  and  the  man  who  seeks  cerebral  intoxica- 
tion from  some  form  of  neuropathy,  that  he  may  forget  — 
most  frequently  that  he  may  forget  himself.  This  is 
the  absinthe-drinker's  intoxication,  Musset's  and  Ver- 
laine's.  And  it  was  that  of  my  unknown  man.  This  is 
the  saddest  kind.  It  is  impossible  for  me  to  give  you  an 
idea  of  the  singular  melancholy  stamped  upon  that  face. 
It  was  no  longer  arrogance  or  insolence  that  I  read  in 
it,  but  an  infinite  and  irremediable  distress,  that  of  a 
life  which  has  missed  its  destiny.  As  I  watched  him, 
he  lifted  his  glass  and  laughed  convulsively  at  some 
thought.  His  front  teeth  were  gone,  and  the  black  hole 
in  that  livid  and  distorted  face,  over  that  milky  poison, 
in  that  vile  den  whose  acrid  reek  came  out  to  me,  was 
a  spectacle  almost  terrible,  I  swear  to  you.  He  emptied 
the  glass  at  one  swallow.  It  must  have  been  his  fourth 
or  fifth,  for  he  laid  down,  to  pay  for  it,  a  silver  coin  and 
received  no  change  in  return.  Kow  in  a  place  like  that 
his  dram  would  cost  three  or  four  sous.     Then,  stiff  and 


34  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

automatic,  with  the  shaking  somnambulist  step  which 
betrays  the  incoordination  of  the  muscles  of  the  extrem- 
ities, —  the  fixity  of  the  aim,  in  the  vacillation  of  the 
movement,  —  he  rises,  comes  out  of  the  shop,  walks  along 
the  sidewalk.  I  follow.  Where  he  goes,  I  go.  We  cross 
the  rue  des  Feuillantines,  the  Val-de-Grace,  the  boulevard 
Port-Koyal.  Finally  he  stops  in  the  rue  du  Faubourg- 
Saint-Jacques,  before  one  of  those  houses  inside  a  court- 
yard which  are  veritable  cities  of  the  destitute.  I  wait, 
but  he  does  not  reappear." 

"  And  then  ?  "  I  asked,  as  he  hesitated. 

"  Then,"  he  resumed,  with  the  visible  embarrassment  of 
a  very  scrupulous  man,  to  whom  underhand  inquiry,  in 
whatever  circumstances,  is  repugnant,  "  I  entered,  I 
found  the  concierge,  I  questioned  him  and  I  learned  the 
man's  name.  He  lodges  there  and  his  name  is,  or  is 
given  out  to  be,  Pierre  Robert." 

"  Very  well,  then  you  have  to  go  to  the  prefecture  of 
police,"  I  said,  "  and  you  can  hear  about  him,  having  his 
name  and  address." 

"  I  thought  of  doing  that,"  Eugene  replied,  "  and  then 
I  gave  it  up,  for  a  very  simple  reason :  my  father  has 
been  employed  at  the  ministry,  and  he  would  know  per- 
fectly well  how  to  protect  himself  from  a  blackmailer. 
If  he  has  not  done  it,  there  must  be  a  reason." 

"  But  what  reason  ?  "  I  urged. 

"  Ah  ! "  he  said,  with  increasing  emotion.  "  How  do  I 
know?    By  thinking  the  whole  matter  over  and  over, 


THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING  36 

I  came  to  the  suspicion  that  this  fellow  was  an 
illegitimate  child  of  my  poor  father,  born  before  his 
marriage,  whose  existence  he  conceals  from  my  mother ; 
and  that  she,  sensitive  as  she  is,  suspects  the  truth 
without  really  knowing  it  —  and  this  explains  so  many 
things  !  No  sooner  did  this  hypothesis  dawn  in  my 
mind  than  I  became  certain  of  its  truth.  I  tell  you 
this  to  show  you  that  I  am  morbid  in  presence  of  this 
trouble  in  which  I  see  that  my  parents  are  involved.  I 
no  longer  distinguish  between  the  possible  and  the  real. 
Since  this  I  have  been  constantly  walking  up  and  down 
the  street  in  front  of  that  house.  It  attracted  and,  at  the 
same  time,  it  terrified  me.  The  idea  that  this  horrible 
degenerate,  whose  stumbling  footsteps  I  had  followed 
along  the  sidewalks  of  those  crowded  thoroughfares, 
might  possibly  be  my  brother,  gave  me  one  of  those  inde- 
scribable shuddering  fits  that  one  feels  to  the  very  roots 
of  his  being.  It  is  not  worth  while  to  dwell  upon  my 
own  insane  acts  and  thoughts  —  for  insane  they  are,  I  am 
ready  enough  to  admit.  But  my  father's  attitude  toward 
me  was  what  distracted  me.  I  have  not  been  alone  with 
him  once  since  the  scene  that  I  have  related  to  you.  As 
I  told  you,  he  evaded  my  inquiry  why  I  should  not  speak 
of  it  to  my  mother.  I  read  anew  in  his  eyes,  every  time 
I  went  to  the  house,  this  entreaty  for  silence,  and  it  had 
the  effect  of  deepening  my  suspicion,  until  yesterday,  in 
the  afternoon,  as  I  was  again  in  the  rue  Saint-Jacques,  I 
beheld  my  mother  entering  that  house." 


36  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

"  And  you  conclude  from  that  ? "  I  asked,  sharing 
unconsciously  in  the  passionate  quest  which  he  was 
following  out  in  my  presence. 

"  Nothing,"  he  said,  "  except  that  my  supposition  is 
false.  If  my  mother,  also,  knows  this  man,  he  is  not 
what  I  had  supposed.  There  is  a  deduction  that  may 
seem  specious:  to  me  it  is  evident  —  in  imploring  me,  as 
he  did,  not  to  speak  of  meeting  this  Robert  in  his  house, 
my  father  had  no  wish  to  conceal  from  my  mother  any- 
thing concerning  this  man,  he  wished  to  hide  from  her 
something  concerning  me.     Now,  why  ?     Yes,  why  ?  " 

He  was  silent,  and  I  could  not  even  find  a  word  to 
express  my  sympathy  for  the  strange  anxiety  with 
which  I  saw  him  overpowered.  That  there  was  some- 
thing abnormal,  even  to  the  extent  of  mystery,  in  the 
sum  of  the  facts  which  he  had  just  made  known  to  me, 
I  was  indeed  forced  to  admit.  But  the  sequence  of  the 
whole  narrative  supposed  some  connection  between  these 
facts,  on  the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other,  his  parents' 
refusal  of  his  request  that  they  should  come  to  live  with 
him.  Now  how  was  it  possible  there  could  be  any  such 
connection  ?  And,  further,  how  was  it  possible  that  the 
impaired  health  which  he  believed  that  he  detected  in 
them  both  had  any  connection  whatever  with  the  exist- 
ence of  this  Pierre  Robert  —  unless,  indeed,  it  were  the 
fact  that  this  probable  blackmailer,  and  evident  beggar 
and  drunkard,  was  the  illegitimate  child,  not  of  the 
father,  but  of  the  mother?     This  was  the  hypothesis 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  37 

which  suddenly  thrust  itself  forward  in  my  mind,  and  I 
perceived  this  horrible  complication:  a  young  girl  is 
seduced ;  a  son  is  born  to  her ;  she  marries  without 
confessing  the  truth ;  the  child  grows  up  at  a  distance 
from  the  mother,  whose  life  is  now  irreproachable.  She 
again  has  a  son,  this  one  born  in  wedlock.  Suddenly  the 
first-born  son  reappears.  He  has  found  his  mother's 
track.  He  threatens.  The  unhappy  woman  confesses  all 
to  her  husband,  who  forgives  her.  But  would  the  legiti- 
mate son  forgive  ?  The  mother  is  ready  to  die  with  ter- 
ror at  the  thought  of  forfeiting  this  precious  esteem,  and 
the  husband  carries  magnanimity  so  far  as  to  understand 
her  terror,  and  even  to  share  it  —  such  were  the 
thoughts  which  rushed  in  upon  me  while  my  friend,  in 
gloomy  silence,  paced  back  and  forth  in  the  room. 
Were  they  not  also  his  thoughts,  at  that  moment  ?  I 
dared  neither  speak  to  him  nor  even  look  at  him,  lest 
this  identity  of  conclusions  should  suddenly  reveal  itself 
to  us  both.  Such  a  truth  would  have  been  extremely 
painful  to  him.  Could  I  foresee  that  the  actual  truth 
would  be  more  painful  still  ? 

Ill 

And  it  was  for  this  reason  —  not  to  betray  the  gravity 
of  my  suspicion  to  this  tortured  son  —  that  I  accepted  the 
proposition,  singular  though  it  was,  with  which  this  con- 
fidence ended.    It  seemed  to  me  that  the  quickest  way  to 


38  THE  DAY  OP   RECKONING 

tranquillize  him  was  to  enter  into  his  ideas,  even  though 
to  me  they  seemed  far  from  reasonable. 

"Now,"  he  resumed,  "let  us  come  to  the  object  of  my 
visit.  I  have  concealed  from  you  nothing  of  all  that 
causes  me  anxiety,  first,  because  I  know  you  are  my 
friend,  and  next,  that  I  may  have  the  right  to  ask  of 
you  a  service  which,  I  am  aware,  lies  very  much  outside 
our  usual  habits  of  action.  And  I  say  again,  as  I  said  at 
first,  if  you  wish  to  refuse,  you  will  do  so.  It  is  this : 
I  am  resolved  to  know  the  facts  about  this  Kobert.  I 
am  resolved,"  and  he  put  into  the  words  all  the  indomi- 
table energy  of  his  extremely  concentrated  nature.  "  I 
had  the  idea  of  going  to  him  myself,  to  make  him  speak. 
Then  I  thought  it  over.  He  saw  me  at  my  father's. 
Very  probably  he  supposed  me  to  be  the  son  of  the 
family.  He  will  be  on  his  guard  against  me.  Well 
then,  will  you,  whom  he  does  not  know,  and  against 
whom  he  will  not  be  on  his  guard,  undertake  it  in- 
stead? The  man  is  poor.  He  begs  from  my  father, 
and  from  others.  This  I  learned  from  the  concierge. 
You  will  go  to  him  on  an  errand  of  charity.  You  will 
give  him  money.  Thus  you  will  satisfy  your  conscience. 
And  you  will  make  him  talk.  You  will  learn  about  his 
life,  who  he  is,  whence  he  comes,  in  short,  something  —  " 

"I  shall  learn,"  I  said,  "whatever  he  may  please 
to  tell  me;  but  for  your  sake  I  will  try  to  make  him 
talk.  Do  not  thank  me,"  I  continued,  as  he  grasped 
my  hand  anew,  with  one  of  those  virile  grips  that  are 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  39 

more  eloquent  than  words ;  "  it  is  too  easy  a  thing.  And 
when  shall  I  go  to  see  this  man  ?  " 

"At  once,  if  you  can,"  he  rejoined  eagerly.  "I  have 
just  come  from  the  Faubourg-Saint-Jacques.  He  is 
at  home." 

This  proof  that  Corbieres  had  counted  on  me  so  fully 
would  have  conquered  any  last  reluctance  that  I  might 
still  have  felt.  "Very  well,  then,  let  us  go,"  I  said, 
and  my  words  brought  a  smile  of  gratitude  to  his 
anxious  face.  We  went  downstairs;  his  fiacre  stood 
at  the  door.  In  his  certainty  that  I  should  accede  to 
his  request  he  had  not  sent  it  away.  From  the  quarter 
of  the  Invalides,  where  I  was  then  living,  to  this  rue 
du  Faubourg-Saint-Jacques,  where  dwelt  the  unknown 
individual  whose  father-confessor  I  must  seek  to  be- 
come, was  scarcely  fifteen  minutes'  drive.  But  the  dis- 
tance seemed  very  long.  If  the  step  I  was  about  to  take 
was  unusual,  at  least  its  failure  would  be  without 
result.  But  nevertheless  my  heart  was  heavy,  as  at 
the  approach  of  a  formidable  trial,  so  powerful  is  the 
contagion  of  certain  anxieties.  It  is  an  altogether 
physical  phenomenon,  which  I  have  often  experienced, 
but  never  as  in  that  carriage  which  bore  us  on,  Eugene 
and  myself,  toward  a  scene  that  I  could  not,  however, 
foresee  would  have  results  so  cruelly  irreparable.  My 
companion,  on  his  part,  said  not  a  word,  except  to  order 
the  driver  to  stop  a  few  doors  off  from  the  house.  He 
pointed  it  out  to  me  and  gave  me  the  number,  adding : 


40  THE   DAY   OF  RECKONING 

"I  shall  wait  here  for  you  in  the  carriage." 
Two  minutes  later  I  had  crossed  the  threshold  of 
the  great  dilapidated  building  which  Corbieres  had  so 
properly  characterized  as  a  city  of  despair.  I  had  asked 
of  the  concierge  the  number  of  M.  Robert's  room.  I 
had  entered,  following  the  woman's  directions,  a  damp 
and  fetid  court,  above  which  opened  six  stories  of  shut- 
terless  windows,  betAveen  which  ropes  were  stretched 
across  supporting  ragged  and  tattered  clothes,  patched 
trousers,  faded  petticoats  —  enough  to  poison  a  whole 
neighbourhood  with  microbes ;  and  I  had  ascended  a 
staircase  which  gave  access  to  many  little  numbered 
rooms,  and  at  last,  under  the  roof,  reached  a  garret  door 
bearing  the  number  63. 

The  key  was  in  the  lock.  I  knocked.  A  voice  called 
out,  "Come  in."  It  was  somewhat  indistinct,  but  not 
the  kind  of  voice  I  expected  to  hear.  It  had  neither 
the  accent  of  the  Faubourg  nor  the  rude  brutality 
of  the  lowest  class ;  and  the  individual  whom  I  beheld 
when  I  opened  the  door  was  plainly  the  man  of  this 
voice.  Doubtless  the  torn  and  faded  rags  which  Pierre 
Robert  wore  gave  him  a  sordid  aspect  which  accorded 
with  the  miserable  room,  almost  unfurnished  and  repul- 
sive with  filth.  But  vileness  of  dress  and  surroundings 
only  made  more  noticeable  in  the  inmate  of  this  den 
the  singularly  refined  features  which  had  struck  Cor- 
bieres so  forcibly.  The  extreme  fineness  of  the  fair 
hair,  which  had  not  at  all  turned  gray,  and  the  very 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  41 

soft  blue  of  the  eyes,  while  the  complexion  was  so 
faded,  bleached  out,  as  it  were,  by  the  use  of  powerful 
drugs,  still  attested  the  real  elegance  of  the  original 
design,  jn  this  face  now  so  debased.  The  ill-kept  hands, 
with  nails  gnawed  to  the  quick,  were  neither  scoundrelly 
nor  vulgar.  The  fingers  were  still  thin  and  slender. 
And  especially  the  sadness  of  the  face  told,  more 
sincerely  than  words  could  do,  of  personal  and  social 
downfall. 

The  outcast  had  scarcely  raised  his  head  as  I  entered. 
Although  it  was  now  nearly  noon,  everything  in  this 
den  had  remained  untouched  over  night.  A  torn 
blanket  lay  over  a  straw  bed,  heaped  together  in  a 
corner,  just  as  the  sleeper  had  left  it,  to  make  a 
breakfast  whose  miserable  remains  lay  on  a  table 
which  had  once  been  white,  —  a  piece  of  a  loaf  of 
bread  from  which  he  had  pulled  the  crumb,  leaving 
the  crust  for  lack  of  teeth  to  bite  it,  and  a  morsel  of 
Italian  cheese  in  a  greasy  paper.  This  miserable  food 
seemed  to  have  been  to  him  only  an  incitement  to 
drink,  for  an  empty  quart  bottle  was  near  by  which 
must  have  contained  white  wine,  to  judge,  not  at  all 
from  the  tumbler,  —  for  there  was  none,  —  but  from  the 
colour  of  the  wet  rings  made  on  the  table  by  this 
bottle,  drained  to  its  last  drop.  Two  chairs,  a  bat- 
tered zinc  slop-pail  without  a  handle,  a  basin  and 
broken-lipped  water-jug,  a  broken  comb,  and  a  frag- 
ment of    glass   on  the   wall    completed   the   furniture. 


42  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

I  have  omitted  to  mention  a  dozen  books,  ranged  on 
a  shelf  with  a  certain  care.  They  were  the  last  relic 
of  an  education,  which  I  afterward  knew  to  have  been 
brilliant,  resulting  at  last  in  what?  in  this  vi(;tim  of 
intemperance,  who  sat  carelessly  smoking  a  short  clay 
pipe,  and  was  already  half  intoxicated,  though  he  had 
not  yet  left  his  room.  Whence  the  tobacco  came  with 
which  the  pipe  was  filled,  appeared  from  the  heap  of 
cigar-ends  that  lay  on  a  corner  of  the  table.  The  vaga- 
bond had  picked  them  up  in  the  streets.  This  philoso- 
pher in  rags  did  not  put  himself  to  any  trouble  in 
receiving  me ;  he  did  not  rise  from  his  seat ;  he  did 
not  abate  one  whiff  of  his  pipe ;  and  his  blue  eyes 
showed  no  curiosity,  no  surprise,  when  I  asked  him, — 
"Is  this  M.  Pierre  Robert?" 
"  It  is,  monsieur ;  what  do  you  want  with  me  ?  " 
I  began  to  explain  to  him,  as  had  been  agreed  with 
Coi'bi^res,  that  I  belonged  to  a  benevolent  society, 
and  having  learned  from  one  of  his  neighbours  that 
he  was  in  need,  had  come  to  see  if  it  were  so.  I 
felt  myself  frightfully  awkward  in  this  rdle,  altogether 
new  to  me,  of  district  visitor.  I  apprehended  an  out- 
break of  that  haughty  arrogance  of  which  Eugene 
had  spoken.  This  revolt  of  offended  pride  did  not 
occur.  He  listened  as  passively  as  he  had  received 
me.  He  took  no  trouble  to  know  the  name  of  the 
society  I  was  supposed  to  represent,  or  of  the  neigh- 
bour who  had  mentioned  him  to  me.      He  said  only. 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  43 

calling  my  attention  to  the  remains  of  his  breakfast 
on  the  table  and  the  cigar-ends  beside  it, — 

"It  is  quite  true  that  at  this  moment  I  am  not 
very  well  off.  You  see  what  I  eat,  and  what  I  smoke. 
But  I  lived  very  differently  in  Africa."  Then,  with  an 
air  of  politeness  which  seemed  like  a  last  remnant  of  the 
habits  of  civilized  life,  he  pointed  to  the  other  chair, 
and  said,  "Do  me  the  favour  to  be  seated,  monsieur." 

"In  Africa?  You  have  been  in  the  service,  then?" 
I  asked,  as  I  sat  down,  taking  advantage  of  the  oppor- 
tunity offered  by  his  remark.  My  question  set  him 
off  at  once.  If  I  had  not  asked  it,  he  would  have 
talked  all  the  same,  with  that  loquacity  of  the  victims 
of  alcohol  so  painful  to  hear  because  it  is  so  evi- 
dently morbid,  by  turns  voluble  and  hesitating.  It  is 
the  first  phase  of  that  which  will  be,  in  three  months, 
in  a  week,  to-morrow,  free  delirium  with  its  uncon- 
trolled swagger  and  boasting.  His  confidential  talk 
was  not  addressed  to  me.  It  was  the  monologue, 
scarcely  guided  by  my  questions,  of  a  half  maniac 
thinking  aloud,  his  head  already  unsettled  by  the 
poison.  He  had  taken  but  little  of  it  this  morning; 
and  still  in  his  condition  of  frightful  saturation  this 
small  amount,  just  one  bottle  of  white  wine,  sufficed  to 
make  him  almost  unable  to  control  his  movements  and 
not  at  all  his  words. 

"I  have  served  my  time  twice,"  he  said;  "I  ought 
to  be  commandant  to-day  and  officer  of  the  Legion  of 


44  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

Honour,  if  I  had  not  been  so  unlucky.  I  am  Bachelor  of 
Arts  and  Bachelor  of  Science,  monsieur,  just  as  you  see 
me.  I  have  even  had  a  prize  in  the  General  Examina- 
tions. I  still  have  one  of  the  books  that  I  received. 
Look,  there  it  is,"  and  he  pointed  out  to  me,  motioning 
with  his  pipe,  which  he  took  out  of  the  corner  of  his 
mouth,  the  row  of  books,  among  which  I  distinguished, 
placed  conspicuously  on  the  shelf,  the  gilt  edges  of  a 
volume  bound  in  green  morocco,  with  the  arms  of  the 
Empire.  "It  is  a  Horace  that  I  re-read  sometimes.  I 
have  not  forgotten  all  my  Latin. 

"  '  Qui  fit  Maecenas,  ut  nemo,  quam  sibi  sortem, 
Seu  ratio  dederit,  seu  fors  objecerit,  illd. 
Contentua  vivaf 

"Contented  with  his  lot!  Keally,  I  can't  be  with 
mine.  Look  at  it,  monsieur.  At  twenty-one,  I  enter  the 
army.  I  choose  the  artillery.  With  my  diplomas  and 
what  I  know  of  mathematics,  I  say  to  myself,  I  shall 
reach  the  School  at  Versailles,  and  in  three  years  I  shall 
be  an  officer.  I  happen  upon  a  quartermaster  who  doesn't 
like  my  looks.  It  takes  me  two  years  to  become  cor- 
poral—  two  years,  with  my  education,  yes,  monsieur! 
Not  till  the  fourth  year  do  I  reach  the  School.  I  am 
received  there.  During  my  time  with  the  regiment,  I 
was  unhappy.  I  drank  a  little.  It  was  natural,  don't 
you  see  ?  The  colonel  in  command  at  the  School  had  a 
grudge  against  me  for  it.  I  don't  know  why  he  had. 
He  meets  me  one  evening,  as  I  was  coming  in,  rather 


THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING  45 

lively  but  nothing  more.  If  he  had  had  the  least  tact, 
he  would  have  let  me  pass  without  seeming  to  notice  it. 
But  instead  of  that,  I  am  sent  to  the  guard-house,  and 
two  days  later,  I  am  dismissed  —  I  go  back  to  the  regi- 
ment. My  five  years  were  just  ending.  I  enter  the 
marine  artillery.  No  more  hope  of  Versailles.  It  was  a 
pity.  I  should  have  made  a  good  officer.  I  look  it  over 
thoroughly.  I  say  to  myself  I  will  go  to  the  colonies 
as  a  soldier,  and  I  will  remain  as  a  colonist.  I  had  two 
years'  service  in  Algeria  and  two  in  Tonkin.  When  I 
saw  what  a  humbug  life  is  out  there,  I  was  disgusted. 
And  then  I  was  ill.  Is  it  worth  while,  I  ask  you,  to 
conquer  countries  where  a  decent  man  cannot  even 
take  his  pousse-cafe  without  his  liver's  getting  wrong  ? 
As  soon  as  I  got  my  liberty,  I  swore  to  myself  I  would 
never  again  leave  Paris.  I  have  been  here  now  three 
years.  It  is  hard  to  live  here  when  a  man  has  no  profes- 
sion, and  at  my  age  —  " 

"  But,"  I  suggested,  "  you  have  a  right  to  a  pension, 
being  a  discharged  non-commissioned  officer  ?  " 

"  TJiey  had  reduced  me  to  the  ranks  before  I  left," 
he  replied.  "  They  pardon  nothing  —  in  a  man  who  has 
no  friends ! " 

Who  were  these  mysterious  They  but  the  imaginary 
persecutors  whom  his  disordered  brain  made  the  poor 
fellow  see  behind  all  his  failures,  until  later,  the  hallu- 
cinations of  delirium  tremens  would  come  to  besiege  him 
with  their  shapes  of  terror.     So  far,  it  was  the  lament- 


46  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

able  confession  of  the  ordinary  outcast,  who  through 
lack  of  will,  through  lack  of  helpful  surroundings, 
through  lack  of  fortune,  also,  has  slipped  rather  than 
walked  down  the  fatal  slope.  It  is  the  cruellest  of  all 
the  consequences  of  the  inevitable  social  inequality  that 
the  margin  of  the  irremediable  faults  is  so  broad  for  the 
rich,  so  narrow  for  the  poor !  A  few  words  more,  and 
this  commonplace  aspect  of  one  of  the  numerous  victims 
of  modern  education  would  be  lighted  with  a  gleam 
which  appals  me  even  now,  when  my  thoughts  revert 
to  that  far-distant  moment. 

"You  have  no  relatives,  then?"  I  said. 

"I  am  an  illegitimate  child,"  he  replied;  "all  my 
misfortunes  arise  from  that.  They  were  not  my  father's 
fault,  however.  He  was  married,  and  he  held  a  posi- 
tion of  importance.  He  did  for  me  what  he  could. 
He  supplied  my  mother  with  money  to  bring  me  up, 
so  long  as  she  lived.  I  was  eight  years  old  at  the 
time  of  her  death.  He  placed  me  at  school  and  paid 
for  me.  If  he  also  had  not  died  just  as  I  left  school, 
my  life  would  have  turned  out  differently,  or,  indeed, 
if  I  had  received  what  he  left  me." 

"  He  did  not  leave  a  legal  will,  then  ? "  I  asked, 
as  he  suddenly  stopped  speaking.  I  dreaded  one  of 
those  sudden  fits  of  reticence  which  will  happen  some- 
times to  these  strange  talkers  who  tell  you  the  most 
intimate  facts  of  their  life,  the  most  disgraceful, 
even,  then  stop    short    at   some  perhaps    insignificant 


THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING  47 

detail  and  become  obstinately  silent,  as  unreasonably 
and  inconsiderately  as  they  had,  just  before,  been  con- 
fidential. Impulsive  creatures  of  the  moment,  they 
obey  only  their  entirely  subjective  impressions.  As  I 
questioned  him,  Kobert  looked  at  me  with  those  blue 
eyes  whose  softness  of  expression  I  had  at  first  re- 
marked, and  whose  strange  changefulness  now  attracted 
my  notice.  Was  he  tired  with  his  long  story,  in  which 
his  occasional  hesitations  before  some  word  revealed 
latent  aphasia  ?  Had  I  expressed  too  eagerly  an  unjus- 
tifiable curiosity,  before  which  he  stopped  in  surprise  ? 
It  was  the  fact,  certainly,  that  instead  of  giving  me 
any  answer  he  resumed, — 

"  You  see,  monsieur,  that  you  have  not  been  deceived, 
and  that  I  have  much  need  of  assistance  from  the 
charitable." 

"You  already  know  some  benevolent  persons,"  I  said, 
taking  from  my  pocket  the  gold  piece  I  had  ready,  and 
I  laid  it  on  the  table,  as  I  mentioned  the  name  of 
Eugene's  parents.  "I  know  that  the  Corbieres  are 
very  good  to  you." 

"  You  know  the  Corbieres  ? "  he  said  to  me,  and, 
taking  his  pipe  out  of  his  mouth,  he  leaned  forward 
and  looked  at  me,  with  a  singular  gleam  in  his  eyes. 
Then,  shrugging  his  shoulders,  he  began  again  to  smoke, 
saying,  "I  understand;  it  is  they  who  have  sent  you. 
I  know  it,  and  I  also  know  why.  Would  you  like  to 
have  me  tell  you?    You  are  going  to   advise  me  to 


48  THE   DAY   OF   KECKONENG 

leave  Paris.  Isn't  that  true  ?  They  have  told  you 
that  I  am  drinking  myself  to  death  here.  That  is 
what  they  tell  me  every  time  I  go  there.  Well,  then, 
no,  no,  no !  I  will  not  go  away.  I  will  not  leave  Paris. 
These  people  shall  see  me,  I  tell  you,  they  shall  see  me  1 
This  is  my  vengeance,  and  they  shall  endure  it  to  the  end." 

While  he  talked  to  me,  taking  my  silence  for  acqui- 
escence, his  face  grew  animated.  I  recognized  that 
expression  of  arrogant  authority  that  Eugene  had  men- 
tioned. This  change  of  demeanour  was  so  singular,  in 
the  case  of  a  beggar  just  now  so  humble,  there  was 
a  threat  so  mysterious  in  the  words  he  employed, 
and  at  the  same  time  the  certainty  of  an  invisible 
right,  that  I  allowed  him  to  go  on  uncontradicted.  I 
had  a  crushing  premonition  of  what  I  was  about  to 
hear.  What  he  had  said  a  few  minutes  before,  if  he 
had  received  tchat  his  father  left  him,  was  suddenly 
illuminated  for  me  with  frightful  clearness.  This 
impression,  however,  was  but  momentary,  and  I  said 
to  him, — 

"You  are  unjust.  I  do  not  come  to  you  from  the 
Corbieres;  but  suppose  I  did  bring  you  such  a  mes- 
sage from  them,  why  not?  If  the  Corbieres  advise 
you  to  leave  Paris,  it  is  for  your  own  welfare.  If  they 
reproach  you  with  fatal  habits  of  intemperance,  they 
are  no  more  than  right.  And  since  you  tell  me  that 
you  have  been  well  brought  up,  you  must  know  that 
you  ought  not  to  speak  thus  of  your  benefactors." 


THE   DAY   OF  RECKONING  49 

"  They  ?  "  he  exclaimed,  "  my  benefactors  ?  They 
have  given  themselves  out  to  you  as  my  benefactors  ?  " 
He  began  to  laugh,  as  Eugene  had  seen  him  laugh  in 
the  liquor  shop  of  the  rue  Saint-Jacques  over  his  glass 
of  absinthe.  A  sudden  change  of  semi-intoxication 
carried  him  at  once  from  torpor  to  excitability.  His 
irritation  rendered  his  speech  still  more  hesitating,  and 
his  words,  uttered  with  this  difficulty,  almost  stam- 
mered out,  had  a  more  poignant  power  of  truth.  It 
was  like  a  symbol  of  the  repression  against  which  he 
had  struggled  all  through  his  youth,  because  of  the 
crime  to  which  he  now  testified. 

"  No,  monsieur,"  he  repeated,  "  they  are  not  my  bene- 
factors. They  are  my  murderers.  That  I  am  what 
you  see  me,  a  withered  fruit,  a  failure,  a  melancholy 
failure,  that  I  am  a  drunkard,  is  their  fault.  I  have 
not  the  proof;  it  is  true  I  have  nothing  that  I  could 
produce  in  court  to  show  that  these  so-called  benefactors 
have  robbed  me;  yes,  monsieur,  they  have  robbed  me. 
And  besides,  what  could  I  do  with  that  money  now? 
Instead  of  having  it  when  I  was  twenty !  At  twenty, 
I  should  have  bought  off  my  military  service.  Then 
I  should  have  studied  law  or  medicine.  I  should  be 
now  a  great  lawyer  or  a  great  doctor.  You  must  not 
judge  me  by  what  you  see  me  now  —  'a,  ruin'd  piece 
of  nature,'  as  the  poet  says." 

He  quoted  the  English  sentence,  with  a  very  incorrect 
accent,  and  yet  clearly  enough  for  me  to  recognize  the 


60  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

famous  cry  of  King  Lear.  That  lie  could,  degraded  as 
he  was,  quote  Shakespeare,  Avere  it  but  a  chance  phrase, 
after  having  quoted  Horace,  were  it  but  two  lines  — 
what  proof  more  heart-rending  could  be  given  that 
there  had  been  in  the  Pierre  Robert  to  whom  I  lis- 
tened an  original  design  for  a  very  different  man? 
Alas  !  There  remained  of  it  only  the  refined  features  of 
the  wasted  face,  these  little  fragments  of  culture,  and 
these  spasms  of  bitterness  against  the  persons  whom  he 
accused  of  having  ruined  him.  It  is  probable  enough 
that  he  would  have  ruined  himself,  by  his  own  character. 
His  nature  would  have  proved  itself  the  same  under 
other  circumstances.  Still  he  had  a  right  to  formulate 
the  accusation  as  he  now  did. 

"It  is  their  fault,  monsieur,"  he  said,  "it  is  their 
fault,  and  theirs  alone.  If  this  is  not  true,  monsieur, 
let  them  justify  themselves.  Go  and  talk  to  them,  you 
who  are  their  friend ;  go  to  them  and  repeat  what  I  tell 
you.  It  will  teach  them  to  send  people  to  me !  Then 
you  will  see  them  turn  pale  and  tremble  before  you,  as  I 
have  seen  them  do  before  me.  They  will  tell  you  that 
I  am  mad,  as  they  have  told  me.  No,  not  they,  he. 
The  old  woman  has  never  done  anything  but  weep,  since 
she  knew  that  I  had  found  it  all  out.  But  I  am  losing 
my  thoughts.  Where  was  I  ?  I  feel  as  if  I  had  wad- 
ding in  my  head.  Ah !  When  I  was  a  schoolboy,  I  was 
living  at  Versailles.  It  was  not  till  long  after  that  I 
knew  who  my  father  was.     I  used  to  call  him  M.  Eobert. 


THE  DAY   OF   KECKONING  61 

This  was  his  first  name,  and  he  gave  it  to  me  for 
my  surname.  I  believed  him  to  be  my  godfather.  I 
used  to  see  him  in  Paris  on  holidays  at  the  house  of 
relatives  of  my  mother  who  were  my  guardians.  It 
was  through  them  that  I  learned  many  things  after- 
ward. My  father  was  married,  as  I  told  you  before, 
and  had  other  children.  He  had  a  very  good  office, 
chef  de  bureau  in  the  Ministry  of  the  Interior,  where 
M.  Corbieres  was  usher.  You  begin  to  understand? 
My  father  had  never  been  willing  that  his  wife  and  his 
other  children,  the  legitimate  ones,  should  know  of  my 
existence.  He  had  had  M.  Corbieres  under  his  orders 
for  years.  In  his  last  illness,  he  intrusted  to  this  man 
the  sum  which  he  had  been  able  to  lay  aside  from  his 
property  —  enough,  as  he  thought,  to  complete  my 
education,  —  thirty-five  thousand  francs,  if  I  am  correct 
in  my  figures." 

"  And  you  believe  that  M.  Corbieres  took  this  money 
for  himself  ?  "  I  interrupted.  "  But  that  is  impossible. 
Why  should  he  do  it  ?  I  know  how  they  live,  he  and 
his  wife.  They  are  the  most  simple,  upright,  honest 
people  —  " 

"These  honest  people  have  plundered  me  all  the 
same,"  sneered  Pierre  Robert,  shaking  his  head,  and  his 
face  expressed  that  bitterest  of  all  contempts,  —  that  of 
the  despised  man  who  can  in  his  turn  despise.  "  Why  ? 
Yes,  why  ?  Their  son,  monsieur,  how  have  they 
brought  him  up?     He  was  able  to  finish  his  military 


52  THE  DAY  OP   RECKONING 

service  in  one  year ;  he  has  had  his  medical  education ; 
and  with  what  money?  A  man  who  is  a  doorkeeper  in 
a  Ministry  has  no  fortune,  of  course.  And  you  think  it 
would  be  by  his  own  savings  that  that  man  had  laid 
aside  money  to  keep  his  son  a  student  to  the  age  of 
thirty  ?  Come,  now!  It  was  my  money,  I  tell  you,  that 
they  spent ;  you  understand  me,  my  moneyJ' 

"  But  you  confess  yourself  that  you  have  not  a  single 
proof  of  what  you  say,"  I  protested;  and  while  I  was 
protesting,  I  was  overwhelmed  by  the  evidence  that  he 
spoke  the  truth.  His  words  were  like  the  key  to  a  page 
of  cipher,  which  makes  the  whole  clear.  The  feeling 
that  I  had  so  often  had  of  a  mystery  connected  with  the 
elder  Corbieres ;  the  sadness  which  made  the  background 
of  their  lives,  so  little  in  keeping  with  their  devotion  to 
their  son;  the  latter's  confidential  talks  with  me  re- 
cently, even  this  very  morning:  all  was  explained  by 
this  revelation  which  Eobert  now  made  still  clearer. 

"  A  proof  to  offer  in  court  was  what  I  meant.  Proofs 
for  myself,  I  have  more  than  enough.  Would  you  like 
to  know  what  they  are?  Before  my  father  died,  he 
wrote  me  a  letter.  I  have  his  letter  here.  He  told  me 
that  he  was  not  my  godfather,  but  my  father.  He  for- 
bade me  ever  to  seek  to  see  his  widow  or  his  other  chil- 
dren. He  went  so  far  as  not  even  then  to  tell  me  his 
own  name.  Monsieur,  I  have  suffered  greatly,  I  swear  to 
you,  but  I  have  always  obeyed  this  order  of  the  dead. 
I  have  never  asked  anything  from  his  widow  or  my 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  68 

brothers.  There  are  two;  they  are  well  off  and  would 
help  me.  I  am  not  willing.  My  father  added  that  he 
had  provided  for  my  future,  that  I  should  receive  fifteen 
hundred  francs  a  year  until  I  was  thirty  years  of  age,  and 
then  a  small  capital.  It  was  the  amount  of  the  income 
which  made  me  reckon  the  principal  at  thirty-five  or 
forty  thousand  francs.  In  his  resolve  to  make  an  abso- 
lute separation  between  the  life  of  his  regular  household 
and  my  life,  he  did  not  tell  me  from  whom  I  should 
receive  this  annual  income  and  the  principal  in  the  end, 
nor  how  he  had  planned  that  even  this  way  of  communi- 
cating with  his  other  children  should  be  debarred  me. 
Afterward  I  knew,  however.  I  knew  that  he  died  very 
suddenly,  and  evidently  without  having  time  to  take  the 
measures  which  he  had  deferred,  perhaps  with  the  ex- 
pectation of  giving  me  personally  this  little  fortune 
when  I  should  attain  my  twenty-first  year.  Then  he 
employed  Corbieres,  because  he  was  sure  of  his  secrecy. 
And  this  Corbieres,  at  that  time,  was  an  honest  man. 
How  do  I  know  this  ?  My  income  for  the  first  and  sec- 
ond years  was  paid  me.  The  third,  not.  This  was  the 
year  of  the  son's  military  service.  The  money  for  these 
two  years  came  to  me  semi-annually,  in  bank-notes  in  a 
registered  envelope,  without  other  words  than  these. 
By  the  wish  of  M.  Robert.  Very  well !  monsieur,  I  have 
since  then  had  the  handwriting  of  M.  Corbieres,  and 
it  is  the  same !  But  I  return  to  this  year,  1873.  The 
money  did  not   arrive.      I    had  to  make  my  military 


54  THE  DAY   OF  RECKONING 

service.  I  had  some  debts;  who  has  not?  I  had  not 
the  means  to  seek  the  reason  why  my  income  ceased  to 
come  to  me  or  to  undertake  a  lawsuit.  Besides  this,  I 
was  very  young ;  and,  at  that  age,  one  is  careless.  One 
expects  to  have  good  luck.  In  short,  I  entered  the 
army,  and  the  rest  you  know." 

"But  how  did  you  find  the  Corbieres  again?"  I 
asked. 

"  You  mean,  how  did  the  Corbieres  find  me  ?  For 
it  was  they  who  sought  me  out.  They  felt  remorse; 
that  was  the  reason.  When  one  comes  near  the  end, 
one  has  these  terrors,  it  appears.  One  would  like  then 
to  humbug  le  bon  Dieu."  He  laughed  again,  with  that 
silent  laugh  which  showed  the  black  space  of  his  tooth- 
less mouth.  "  They  wanted  to  know  what  had  become 
of  me.  They  found  me.  How,  do  you  want  to  know  ? 
I  will  not  tell  you  that.  Finding  me  poor,  they 
began  to  give  me  a  bit  of  money  now  and  then,  to 
quiet  their  consciences,  and  also  to  keep  off  bad  luck. 
They  have  not  succeeded  very  well !  When  I  saw 
old  Corbieres  for  the  first  time,  sitting  where  you  are, 
monsieur,  I  let  him  talk,  just  as  I  let  you  talk  just 
now.  He  said  that  he  knew  I  was  poor,  and  that  he 
came  to  help  me  a  little.  I  can  appear  to  believe 
anything,  don't  you  know?  But  I  think  it  over  by 
myself.  I  said  to  myself:  'Well,  old  fellow,  what  do 
you  want  of  me  ?  Why  have  you  come  here  ? '  I 
couldn't    understand    it.      Then    he    came    again,    and 


THE   DAY  OF   RECKONING  65 

his  wife;  first,  every  month;  then,  every  week.  They 
brought  me  my  week's  living.  This  was  their  pretext; 
but,  in  reality,  they  could  not  stay  away.  I  attracted 
them  with  a  kind  of  fascination.  I  looked  them  in 
the  eye,  and  they  dropped  their  eyes.  They  could 
never  look  me  in  the  face,  monsieur.  Why  ?  And 
then  the  idea  came  to  me  that  they  had  had 
something  to  do  with  my  affairs.  I  spoke  to  them  of 
the  money  that  I  ought  to  have  had,  and  of  my 
father's  letter.  From  that  day  I  felt  that  I  had  them 
in  my  power.  Oh ! "  he  ended,  "  so  far  as  my  ill 
will  is  concerned  they  are  very  wrong  in  being  afraid, 
and  in  wishing  that  I  would  go  away.  A  five-franc 
piece,  now  and  then,  to  get  something  to  drink ;  and 
I  call  it  quits.  If  I  cared,  their  son  is  rich.  He 
would  give  me  back  the  whole.  But  if  I  had  it  all, 
now,  what  could  I  do  with  it?  I  do  frighten  them 
a  little  now  and  then,  I  admit.  That  is  for  my  amuse- 
ment. Life  is  not  very  amusing.  Happily  it  won't 
last  always ! " 

He  broke  out  again  with  his  sinister  laugh.  Then, 
seeing  the  napoleon  that  I  had  placed  on  the  table, 
he  picked  it  up,  slipped  it  into  the  pocket  of  the 
jersey  which  served  as  a  waistcoat  under  his  coat,  and, 
rising  from  his  chair,  made  a  gesture  as  if  to  usher 
me  out,  saying,  "I  am  much  obliged  to  you,  monsieur. 
But  will  you  tell  them  that  it  is  not  worth  while  for 
them  to  send  other  charitable  persons  to  me  to  advise 


66  THE   DAY   OP   RECKONING 

me  to  leave  Paris.  It  is  not  worth  while.  To  all 
who  may  come  from  them  —  to  all,  you  understand  — 
I  shall  relate  their  story.  And  I  shall  never  leave 
Paris.  I  shall  never  leave  it,  and  I  shall  go  to  their 
house,  and  they  will  receive  me,  you  may  tell  them. 
Adieu,  monsieur,  adieu!" 

It  was  not  until  I  was  outside  of  the  room,  where 
I  had  listened  to  this  tragic  confession,  that  I  realized 
its  immediate  consequence  —  with  a  shudder  of  alarm 
that  I  do  not  remember  to  have  experienced  before  or 
since.  Eugene  Corbi^res  awaited  me  below.  What 
was  I  to  say  to  him?  My  fear  of  meeting  his  search- 
ing gaze  was  so  great  that  my  knees  bent  under  me  as 
I  went  down  the  steps  of  that  staircase  at  whose  foot 
I  must,  however,  arrive.  And  then  ?  —  I  remember 
stopping  for  several  minutes  on  the  landing  of  the 
second  story,  trying  to  recover  myself.  I  must  at  all 
hazards  find  strength  to  ward  oif  Eugene's  questions 
by  replies  calculated  as  well  as  might  be  to  turn  him 
away  from  the  pursuit  of  this  frightful  investigation. 
The  first  condition  was  that  my  face  should  not  belie 
my  words.  Would  my  compassion  for  my  friend, 
threatened  with  this  fearful  revelation,  have  given 
me  this  strength?  I  had  not  the  occasion  to  put  my 
will  thus  to  the  proof.  I  had  not  taken  into  account 
the  fever  of  impatience  by  which  Eugene  was  devoured. 
As  my  absence  became  more  prolonged,  he  had  come, 
himself,  to  the  door  of  the  house,  then  into  the  court, 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  57 

then  to  the  foot  of  the  stairs ;  so  that  when  I  came 
to  the  last  step,  hesitating  and  upset  as  I  was,  he 
appeared  before  me,  with  the  question,  "  You  have 
been  very  long.     What  did  he  say  ?  " 

"Nothing  of  interest,"  I  rejoined.  "It  is  what  I 
supposed.  A  poor  wretch  to  whom  your  father  had 
given  money." 

"  Why,  then,  are  you  so  agitated  ? "  he  went  on. 
"You  tremble.     You  are  pale." 

"His  wretched  condition  affected  me,"  I  answered; 
and  I  added,  seeking  to  drag  him  away,  "come  out; 
a  little  fresh  air  will  do  me  good." 

"Yes,"  he  said;  then,  stopping  short,  he  fastened 
his  eyes  upon  mine.  "No,  there  is  something.  I  feel 
it.  I  see  it.  You  are  not  telling  me  the  truth.  You 
will  not?     Well,  then,  I  will  go  up  myself." 

"You  shall  not  go,"  I  said,  barring  his  way.  But 
no  sooner  had  I  uttered  the  cry  than  I  felt  its  impru- 
dence, and  I  tried  to  repair  the  harm,  saying,  "It  is 
useless  and  dangerous.  The  fellow  gets  too  much  from 
your  father." 

"You  are  not  telling  me  the  truth,"  Eugene  repeated, 
still  more  sharply ;  and  before  I  could  be  aware  of 
what  he  was  about  to  do,  he  had  flung  me  aside  with 
violence  and  was  running  upstairs,  four  steps  at  a 
time.  I  stood  still,  paralyzed  by  emotion,  and  mak- 
ing no  further  attempt  to  detain  him.  Knowing  what 
I  knew,  it  seemed  to  mc  that  I  felt  upon  my  brow  the 


68  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

breath  of  fate,  as  I  stood  on  the  staircase  of  the  miserable 
house.  That  the  two  men  should  meet  appeared  to  me 
inevitable.  It  was  better  this  should  happen  now,  and 
I  be  there  to  support  my  friend  at  the  very  moment 
when  he  received  this  terrible  blow  —  if  he  must  receive 
it.  I  forced  myself  to  hope,  there  in  that  dismal 
barrack  of  poverty,  that  a  last  remnant  of  humanity 
might  stay  the  outcast's  hand.  The  fact  that  he  had 
limited  his  demands  for  money  to  the  elder  Corbieres, 
when  he  could  so  easily  have  levied  blackmail  upon 
Eugene,  struck  me  suddenly  as  very  significant.  He 
had  said  it  to  me  himself,  and  with  a  certain  emphasis. 
I  tried  to  feel  that  here  was  the  proof  of  a  reluctance 
to  make  so  cruel  a  revelation,  and  one  so  unjustifiable 
also.  The  son  had  had  no  share  in  the  father's  fault. 
If  he  had  profited  by  it,  he  had  done  so  unwittingly, 
and  to  denounce  it  to  him  was  a  savage  act.  Pierre 
Robert  had  not  shown  himself,  in  his  interview  with 
me,  to  be  either  unjust  or  savage.  I  reasoned  thus, 
and  I  forgot  that  a  man  insane  from  the  habitual  use 
of  liquor,  as  he  was,  is  always  ready,  under  the 
moment's  excitement,  to  commit  acts  the  most  con- 
trary to  his  natural  character  and  to  his  more  consid- 
erate will.  He  had  thought,  in  his  bad  hours,  of 
addressing  himself  to  the  son,  but  had  always  recoiled 
from  it  as  an  infamous  deed.  I  was  about  to  find 
that  the  instinct  for  revenge,  awakened  unawares,  was 
to  be  the  stronger.     It  was  indeed  astonishing  that  a 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONIKG  69 

scruple,  really  of  great  magnanimity,  could  have  held 
out  so  long  in  a  being  so  degraded.  The  victim  of 
alcohol  had  not  been  master  of  his  words  with  me. 
How  could  he  become  so  once  more  in  these  few  min- 
utes that  had  passed,  and  in  the  presence  of  the  per- 
son who  excited  in  his  mind  the  bitterest  memories  ? 
Without  my  very  clear  consciousness,  all  these  contra- 
dictory ideas  struggled  together  in  my  mind,  as  I  waited 
for  my  friend's  return.  I  was  now  outside  of  the  house. 
The  need  of  relieving  my  excitement  by  motion  had  made 
me  leave  the  staircase  and  then  the  courtyard.  I  now 
stood  on  the  sidewalk,  counting  the  minutes,  asking 
myself  if  I  ought  not  again  to  go  upstairs,  a  prey  to 
one  of  the  deadliest  agonies  that  has  ever  tortured  me, 
when  Eugene  Corbi^res  appeared  upon  the  threshold 
of  this  door  to  the  house  of  woe.  We  looked  at  each 
other.     Robert  had  told  him  all. 

IV 

There  are,  in  every  great  doctor,  as  in  every  great 
dramatic  author,  and  probably  in  every  great  actor, 
certain  faculties  much  nearer  akin  to  the  type  of  the 
man  of  action  than  to  that  of  the  man  of  thought. 
These  complex  professions,  which  require  so  much  ani- 
malism, presuppose  also  an  exceptional  capacity  for  per- 
sonal affirmation,  for  immediate  decision,  for  resolve 
carried  at  once  into  action.     They  call  for  a  direct  grasp, 


60  THE   DAY    OF   RECKONING 

SO  to  speak,  of  reality.  There  is  needed  that  bodily 
vigour  which  enables  the  man  to  conquer  his  nerves.  I 
have  often  had  occasion  to  verify  this  remark  in  my 
relations  with  the  higher  individuals  of  these  three 
intellectual  species.  Never  more  fully  than  in  the 
moments  that  followed  the  interview  of  Eugene  Corbi- 
hres  with  the  man  whom  his  parents  had  plundered, 
have  I  witnessed  this  almost  soldierly  virtue  of  the 
medical  training. 

Eugene  was  undoubtedly  crushed  with  grief  by  the 
revelation  that  he  had  just  undergone.  He  had  not 
the  least  doubt  of  its  truth;  this  I  perceived  at  once  in 
his  eyes.  But  not  a  gesture,  not  a  word  betrayed,  even 
to  me,  the  fearful  inner  storm.  He  said  to  me  simply, 
"  You  will  not  mind  leaving  me  at  the  rue  Amyot  ? 
The  carriage  will  then  take  you  home."  And  upon  my 
affirmative  reply,  he  gave  the  man  his  father's  address  in 
a  perfectly  tranquil  voice. 

While  the  fiacre  bore  us  along  through  the  old  quarter 
of  Val-de-Gr§,ce,  he  could  see  through  the  carriage  window 
the  succession  of  street  corners  we  both  knew  so  well, 
the  fronts  of  shops,  the  hundred  familiar  aspects  that 
brought  up  to  his  mind,  as  it  did  to  mine,  the  ghosts 
of  so  many  hours  of  his  studious  youth.  Had  we  not 
often  wandered  together  along  these  sidewalks,  he  going 
to  a  lecture  and  I  accompanying  him,  or  else  perhaps  I 
going  toward  the  Luxembourg  and  he  with  me,  to  pro- 
long one  of  our  interminable   talks   about  ideas  ?     All 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  61 

these  hours,  —  yes,  all  of  them,  those  of  ardent  labours, 
those  also  of  noble  pleasures,  —  was  it  possible  that 
they  were  due  to  an  abominable  crime,  that  his  father 
and  mother  had  stolen  for  him  the  opportunity,  for  them 
all,  from  the  wretched  man  whom  we  had  just  left  ?  If 
this  evidence  overwhelmed  with  distress  me,  who  was 
but  a  witness,  what  must  be  the  despair  of  him,  the 
living  actor  in  this  frightful  drama  —  a  drama  of  which 
he  was  the  hero,  and  of  which  he  had  known  nothing ! 
He  preserved,  however,  that  absolute  mastery  of  him- 
self which  I  had  often  witnessed  in  him  beside  hospital 
cots.  He  seemed  to  be  present  at  his  own  death-bed,  with 
the  same  mental  firmness  he  had  shown  in  alleviating 
so  many  other  death  pangs  less  agonizing  than  his  own. 
His  face  had  the  determination  of  a  clenched  fist,  his 
eyes  were  tearless,  his  lips  shut.  No  more  now  than  in 
the  previous  drive  did  we  speak  to  each  other.  Why 
should  we  have  spoken  ?  It  was  I,  the  person  not  con- 
cerned, in  whom  emotion  triumphed  first  over  this 
manly  reserve.  When  he  got  out  in  the  rue  Amyot,  I 
could  not  help  saying,  in  a  tone  smothered  by  anguish, 
as  I  grasped  his  hand,  — 

"  Remember  how  they  have  loved  you." 

"  It  would  have  been  better  that  they  had  hated  me," 
he  answered;  "I  should  be  less  angry  with  them 
now." 

These  sacrilegious  words  were  said  in  a  tone  vibrat- 
ing with  such  an  impulse  of  indignation,  at  once  implac- 


62  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

able  and  cold,  his  look  had  such  an  intensity  of  contempt, 
I  felt  that  he  had  come  to  such  a  state  of  concealed 
frenzy  under  his  calm  exterior,  that  I  let  him  enter  the 
house  and  disappear  without  making  him  any  answer. 
And  again,  why  should  I  have  spoken  ?  I  threw 
myself  back  in  the  carriage,  abandoning  myself  com- 
pletely to  the  pity  that  overflowed  my  heart,  and  I  could 
only  say  over  and  over  again  the  same  words,  — 

"  Dieu  !  those  poor  people  !  those  poor  people ! " 

The  vision  which  wrung  from  me  this  cry  of  terror  was 
that  of  my  friend  appearing  as  a  minister  of  justice 
before  this  old  man  and  this  old  woman,  and  disowning 
them,  heaping  upon  them  reproaches  for  having  made 
him  the  accomplice  in  an  infamous  act,  in  this  violation 
of  a  trust  left  them  by  the  dead.  I  saw  the  son  enter- 
ing that  apartment  that  I  knew  so  well ;  I  saw  them,  the 
parents ;  I  heard  their  voices :  "  Will  you  kill  your 
mother,  0  my  son!"  —  "If  is  not  I  who  take  your  life; 
it  is  yourself  who  have  done  it ! "  The  dialogue  between 
the  eternal  Clytemnestra  and  the  eternal  Orestes  came 
into  my  mind ;  and  I  was  afraid. 

When,  later,  Eugene  related  to  me  through  what 
emotions  he  had  passed  during  that  hour  which  truly 
was  the  hour  of  his  life,  that  in  which  his  life's  destiny 
was  determined,  I  felt  how  rightly  I  had  apprehended  a 
tragic  scene,  and  a  frightful  denouement  to  this  frightful 
occurrence. 

" My    resolution    was    made,"    he    said    to   me ;  "I 


THE   DAY    OF   RECKONING  63 

intended  to  question  them,  to  know  the  truth  from  them 
also ;  to  curse  them ;  and  then  to  kill  myself." 

It  was  with  a  heart  shaken  by  emotions  of  such 
violence  that  the  unhappy  son  reached  the  door  of  his 
guilty  parents.  In  this  acute  crisis  of  inner  revolt,  his 
past  existence  caused  him  such  repulsion  that  it  hurt 
him  to  give  the  habitual  double  ring  at  the  door;  this 
recognized  signal,  to  which  he  knew  they  would  respond, 
represented  to  him,  for  an  instant,  the  long  years  that 
they  had  lived  here  together,  they  and  he  —  they,  the 
thieves,  he,  their  accomplice. 

Without  doubt,  if  it  had  been  his  father's  footstep  that 
approached,  and  if,  the  door  being  opened,  he  had  been 
confronted  with  a  person  of  his  own  sex,  his  anger 
would  have  wreaked  itself  in  some  irreparable  outburst. 
Fortunately,  the  old  man  was  not  in  the  apartment. 
Eugene  heard,  through  the  thin  door,  the  light  step  of 
his  mother,  and  when  the  bolt  had  slidden  back,  he 
found,  to  welcome  him,  the  eyes  and  the  smile  of  the 
old  woman  —  tjiose  eyes  whose  painful  feverishness  he 
understood  now,  that  smile  which  played  over  features 
whose  change  he  had  studied  for  days :  to-day  he  knew 
its  cause.  And  suddenly,  before  this  feeble  creature, 
who  had  carried  him  in  her  breast,  who  had  fed  him  with 
her  milk,  —  ill,  because  of  remorse  for  the  crime  she  had 
committed  for  his  sake,  —  the  son  felt  his  indignant 
revolt  stop  short,  break  down,  dissolve  in  a  poignant 
emotion  that  made  him    tremble  from  head   to   foot. 


64  THE   DAY    OF   BECKONING 

Meantime  the  old  mother,  whose  aged  eyes,  in  the  half 
darkness  of  the  little  anteroom,  had  not  seen  his  face 
clearly,  reclosed  the  door  with  the  accustomed  precau- 
tions, and  began  relating  to  him,  as  usual,  the  humble 
domestic  chronicle  of  her  home. 

"If  I  had  only  known,"  she  said,  "that  you  would 
come  this  morning,  I  would  have  had  a  good  breakfast 
for  you,  eggs  cooked  with  tomatoes,  as  you  like  to  have 
them,  I  saw  some  fresh  eggs  at  the  market  in  the  rue 
Monge  when  I  was  there  this  morning.  And  your 
father  has  just  now  gone  out.  He  was  not  very  well 
this  morning.  He  has  his  suffocating  fits  all  the  time. 
You  must  examine  his  heart.  But,  my  child,  what  is 
the  matter  with  you  ?  " 

As  she  talked,  she  had  followed  him  into  the  dining 
room,  and  now  looking  at  him  in  the  broad  light,  she 
became  aware  that  her  son  was  suffering  from  some 
extraordinary  emotion. 

"My  child!"  she  repeated.  "My  child!  Eugene! 
Ah!" 

She  ceased  speaking.  The  cry,  which  came  from  her 
mother's  heart,  warned  by  the  most  overwhelming  of 
intuitions,  stopped  short  before  the  explosion  of  despair 
of  him  to  whom  she  spoke.  Corbieres  had  dropped  into 
a  chair  and  burst  into  convulsive  sobs.  To  find  himself 
—  knowing  what  he  now  knew  —  thus  in  the  midst  of 
these  humble  objects  among  which  he  had  lived,  in  this 
atmosphere  which  had  been  that  of  all  his  youth,  was 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  65 

more  than  he  could  bear,  and  he  was  swept  away  by  the 
wave  of  violent  emotion  which  rose  within  him.  It  may 
be  that  this  outbreak  of  tears  saved  him  from  madness 
and  suicide,  breaking  through  the  frightful  tension  which 
had  seemed  to  shrivel  up  his  whole  being;  and  in  this 
little  domestic  spot,  where  all  the  successes  of  the 
schoolboy  and  the  student  had  been  fgted,  the  mother 
listened  with  terror  to  that  storm  of  sobs  and  stifled  cries 
which  a  man's  extreme  suffering  utters.  As  to  its  cause, 
the  unhappy  woman  could  scarcely  have  a  doubt.  Long 
had  she  dreaded  the  discovery  by  her  son  of  the  crime 
she  and  her  husband  had  committed  —  committed  for 
him,  but,  all  the  same,  a  crime !  And  she  said,  leaning 
over  him,  throwing  her  arms  about  him,  herself  almost 
frantic :  — 

"  My  Eugene,  it  is  I,  it  is  your  mother !  Look  at  me. 
You  are  suffering  ?  What  is  it  ?  Why  do  you  weep  ? 
Ah!  tell  me  —  " 

Then,  with  violence :  — 

"  Speak  to  me !  Whatever  you  have  to  say  to  me,  say 
it !     You  hurt  me  too  much  —  " 

She  had  made  this  last  appeal  with  such  a  fierce 
energy  of  maternal  love,  that  it  had  in  it  that  irresist- 
ible suggestion  which  goes  to  the  very  depths  of  the 
soul  and  compels  confession.  The  man  raised  his  head 
and  said  to  her,  putting  into  the  words  all  his  grief, 
but,  also,  all  the  tenderness  which  now  mingled  with 
it,— 


66  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

"  My  poor  mother,  I  have  just  come  from  the  rue  du 
Faubourg-Saint- Jacques." 

She  made  no  answer.  Against  his  will,  after  having 
spoken  to  her,  he  had  looked  at  her.  He  saw  her  re- 
coil, her  aged  hands  outstretched  as  if  to  push  some- 
thing away,  and  she  became  so  frightfully  pale  that 
he  thought  she  might  be  dying.  The  physician  was 
aroused  in  the  son,  and  in  his  turn,  he  sprang  toward 
her,  calling  her  by  the  same  name  that  he  would  have 
used  twenty  years  before,  if  he  had  seen  her  grow  pale 
like  that. 

"  Mamma ! "  he  cried. 

"  Leave  me  alone,"  she  said,  still  shrinking  away  from 
him  until  she  had  reached  the  other  side  of  the  room. 
Then  she  turned,  covered  her  face  with  her  hands,  and 
knelt  to  pray.  When  she  rose  to  her  feet,  after  some 
time,  she  had  in  her  eyes,  upon  her  brow,  around  her 
mouth,  a  kind  of  serenity  in  the  midst  of  despair,  which 
was  a  very  marked  contrast  with  the  expression  of  deep- 
seated  worry  which  had  caused  her  son  anxiety  for  so 
many  years. 

"  It  is  better  so,"  she  moaned,  with  a  strange  exalta- 
tion. "It  has  stifled  me  for  too  long.  God  has  been 
merciful  to  me.  Yes,"  she  continued,  with  still  more 
ardour,  "  I  have  felt  that  it  would  be  deliverance  if  you 
knew,  if  I  could  talk  to  you,  explain  to  you,  if  I  had  this 
suffering  in  the  present  life !  You  would  have  known  it 
at  the  day  of  judgment,  when  all  secrets  will  be  revealed, 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  67 

and  then  it  would  have  been  too  horrible."  Closing  her 
eyes  and  shuddering,  she  went  on :  "I  am  ready  to 
drink  the  cup.  The  good  God  has  given  me  strength. 
Tell  me  all,  Eugene,  tell  me  all  that  you  know ;  and  I 
will  tell  you  what  is  true  and  what  is  not.  You  must  obey 
me,  my  child,  because  I  am  your  mother,  who  has  loved 
you  only  too  well.  Question  me,  I  command  you,  that 
there  may  be  nothing  between  us  now  but  the  truth  —  " 

"I  will  try,"  Eugene  said,  after  a  moment's  silence. 
He  felt,  in  the  presence  of  the  suddenly  firm  attitude 
of  her  whom  he  knew  so  anxious,  so  hesitating,  a  senti- 
ment of  respect,  all  the  more  strange  because  he  had 
come  to  have  an  explanation  which,  in  itself,  was  an 
outrage.  But  there  is  in  the  heroic  acceptance  of  cer- 
tain trials  a  secret  grandeur,  before  which  even  the 
judge  who  condemns  must  bow;  and  it  was  with  this 
emotion  —  the  noblest  that  he  could  have  at  that 
moment,  the  only  one  which  could  save  him  from 
moral  parricide  in  this  interrogatory  —  that  he  went 
on,  "  Is  it  true  that  the  wretched  outcast  who  lives 
over  there,  in  the  rue  Eaubourg-Saint-Jacques,  this 
Pierre  Robert,  is  the  illegitimate  child  of  a  man  who 
once  befriended  my  father  ?  " 

"It  is  true,"  she  said;  "he  is  the  son  of  M.  Pierre 
Robert  Haudric.  That  is  why  he  has  his  name.  This 
M.  Haudric  was  your  father's  foster-brother.  Your 
grandmother  was  his  nurse  at  Peronne.  It  is  he  who 
gave  us  our  place  in  the  office." 


68  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

"Then,"  resumed  the  son,  who  could  not  find  words 
to  express  the  hideous  fact,  "  the  rest  is  true  also  ? " 

"That  M.  Haudric  intrusted  to  us  a  sum  of  money 
for  this  son  ?    That  is  also  true." 

"  And  that  you  have  used  it  for  me  ? "  Eugene 
asked  in  a  faint  voice,  scarcely  audible,  as  if  he  feared 
if  he  should  hear  his  own  words  he  might  again  be 
seized  with  a  frenzy  of  revolt  against  that  disgrace 
with  which  he  felt  himself  covered.  And  it  was  almost 
inaudibly  that  she  answered  him, — 

"It  is  true."  Then,  supplicating,  with  clasped  hands 
she  went  on :  "  Listen  to  me,  Eugene,  listen :  we 
have  been  very  guilty ;  but  to  understand  us,  you  must 
know  all ;  and,  first,  that  this  son  of  M.  Haudric  had 
already  caused  his  father  great  anxiety.  He  was  in- 
telligent, but  a  worthless  fellow  even  while  a  boy  in 
school.  On  this  account  M.  Haudric  said  to  Corbieres, 
*  He  must  not  have  anything  before  he  is  thirty  except 
just  the  money  indispensable  for  his  education.'  The 
sum  he  fixed  was  twelve  hundred  francs  a  year. 
The  entire  principal  was  thirty-six  thousand  francs. 
We  were  not  to  let  him  know  us  because  M.  Haudric 
had  a  wife.  The  mother  of  Pierre  Robert  was  a  near 
relation  of  his  wife's,  an  own  cousin.  How  could  he 
have  been  guilty  of  such  a  fault,  and  he  such  a  worthy 
man !  I  used  to  judge  him  very  severely,  but  I  know 
now  that  I  was  wrong,  and  that  we  should  judge  no 
one.     He  had  other  children,  and  it  was  his  wish  that 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  69 

the  secret  should  die  with  him.  —  I  explain  all  this 
to  you  that  you  may  understand  how  we  came  to  be 
tempted. — Your  father  was  to  keep  watch  upon  the 
boy  from  a  distance.  The  first  year  we  sent  him 
his  allowance  as  we  ought,  and  we  knew  that  he 
lived  in  the  Latin  Quarter,  with  disreputable  women, 
going  about  from  one  cafe  to  another,  attending  no 
lectures,  nor  working  at  any  useful  thing.  He  was 
already  a  drunkard,  at  nineteen  1  The  second  year 
we  again  sent  his  money ;  he  did  the  same  and  even 
worse.  Your  father  made  inquiries  and  learned  that 
he  had  contracted  many  debts.  The  third  year," 
she  stopped  a  moment,  then,  with  the  fervour  of 
one  consummating  her  sacrifice,  continued;  "the  third 
year  was  the  time  for  your  military  service.  That 
you  might  be  let  off  with  only  one  year,  we  needed 
to  pay  fifteen  hundred  francs.  We  had  not  the  money. 
Our  poor  little  savings  —  seven  thousand  francs,  laid 
aside,  sou  by  sou  —  had  been  lost  in  a  bad  investment. 
You  were  so  industrious.  You  had  done  so  well  in 
reaching  the  point  where  you  then  were.  What  could 
we  do?  We  could  not  endure  the  thought  that  your 
studies  must  be  interrupted ;  and  it  was  not  merely 
the  question  of  a  longer  or  shorter  military  service, 
but  of  all  the  future.  Oh !  if  the  other  had  been 
like  you;  if  we  had  been  able  to  feel  that  the  money 
would  not  be  wasted  on  him,  that  he  would  use  it  to 
become  somebody,  the   temptation   never  would    have 


70  THE   DAY   OP   RECKONING 

taken  hold  of  us.  I  know,  we  had  not  the  right. 
The  money  was  his,  not  ours.  But  you  were  so 
worthy  of  it,  Eugene,  and  he  so  unworthy!  And  we 
yielded  —  " 

"And  you  never  thought,"  Eugene  said,  "that  just 
because  of  this  very  feebleness  of  character  that  other 
had  more  need  of  the  money  than  I  ?  Did  you  never 
say  to  yourselves  that,  in  taking  away  this  little  prop- 
erty, you  left  him  more  helpless;  that,  with  his  lack 
of  energy,  having  no  means,  he  would  fall  lower  and 
lower,  and  I,  your  son,  would  be  the  person  responsible 
for  this  ?  " 

"You?"  cried  the  mother.  "You,  you  responsi- 
ble ?  Don't  say  it,  my  child,  don't  think  it !  Neither 
you  nor  your  father,"  she  continued,  smiting  her 
breast  as  she  did  in  church.  "I  take  it  all  upon 
myself.  It  was  I  who  had  the  idea  of  using  a  part  of 
the  money  for  your  military  service.  It  was  I  who 
persuaded  Corbieres.  He  did  not  Avish  to  do  it,  and 
I  urged  him.  Then  he  proposed  to  go  on  sending 
the  allowance,  taking  it  out  of  the  principal.  I  pre- 
vented him.  I  was  afraid  that  there  would  not  be 
money  enough  left  for  your  studies.  And  so  it  was 
done.  I  tell  you,  I  loved  you  too  well,  more  than  my 
eternal  salvation,  more  than  God.  Here  was  my  sin. 
The  rest  followed  naturally.  I  knew  that  I  should 
lose  my  soul,  but  it  was  for  you.  It  is  ten  years, 
Eugene,  ten    years  since   I  have   been  to    confession, 


THE  DAY   OF  KECKONING  71 

for  fear  the  priest  might  tell  me  to  give  back  what 
was  left  of  the  money.  You  might  need  it.  Yes,  I 
have  loved  you  too  well,  my  child;  and  through  you 
God  has  punished  me  from  the  very  first.  Not  that 
you  have  ever  caused  me  pain,  you,  perfection  upon 
earth !  But  for  that  very  reason,  because  you  were 
so  perfect,  I  began  to  have  an  anxiety,  a  presentiment, 
that  this  would  not  last,  that  we  should  not  succeed, 
that  you  would  be  taken  away,  suddenly,  in  the  midst 
of  youth  and  hope.  I  assure  you,  if  we  had  had  diffi- 
culties, if  you  had  been  less  industrious,  I  should  not 
have  had  this  impression  of  a  threat  always  hanging 
over  us  because  of  what  we  had  done.  I  tried  to  get 
rid  of  this  terror  by  punishing  myself  voluntarily; 
your  father  the  same.  After  he  had  allowed  himself 
to  be  persuaded  by  me,  he  deprived  himself  of  every- 
thing,—  tobacco,  coffee,  —  and  he  eats  no  more  than  just 
enough  to  keep  himself  alive.  We  can  do  ourselves  the 
justice  to  say  that  we  took  nothing  for  ourselves.  But 
for  all  I  fasted  and  mortified  the  flesh,  I  could  never 
get  rid  of  the  idea  that  the  day  would  come  when  I 
should  be  struck  through  you.  The  years  have  passed, 
Eugene,  and  have  brought  me  only  reason  to  love  you 
more,  and  be  more  and  more  proud  of  you.  And  the 
more  I  was  happy  through  you,  the  stronger  grew  the 
feeling  that  I  had  not  the  right  to  this  happiness.  I 
hardly  know  how  to  express  it.  Every  success  of 
yours,   every  time  you    gave   us   reason    to   rejoice,   it 


72  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

was  as  if  the  debt  grew  larger.  You  can  see  that  I 
was  right  in  thinking  that  we  should  have  to  pay  it 
all  some  day,  since  I  am  talking  now  like  this.  This 
thought  had  grown  so  strong  and  haunted  me  so,  that 
two  years  ago  I  thought  I  would  try  to  get  a  little 
relief  from  it.  Your  father  and  I  knew  that  the  other 
was  in  the  regiment,  and  then  in  a  school  at  Versailles, 
and  had  been  expelled  for  misconduct.  Then  we  had 
lost  sight  of  him.  I  had  the  idea  that  if  we  could 
find  him  and  restore  to  him,  not  the  whole  but  some- 
thing—  could  help  him,  I  should  be  relieved  from 
part  of  the  burden,  should  no  longer  have  this  terror 
at  my  heart.  And  Corbieres  sought  for  him,  and  at 
last  found  him.  Why  did  I  also  want  to  see  him? 
I  could  not  help  it.  It  seemed  as  if  I  must  have  him 
before  my  eyes.  Then  I  felt  that  I  was  having  my 
punishment.  When  I  saw  what  he  had  become,  remorse 
seized  me,  and  I  was  afraid,  not  for  ourselves,  but  for 
you,  I  said  to  myself  what  you  said  to  me  just  now, 
that  perhaps,  with  this  money  of  which  we  had  de- 
frauded him,  he  would  not  have  fallen  so  low.  I  no 
longer  saw  in  this  use  of  the  money  an  unlawful  thing 
merely;  I  saw  that  it  was  a  crime.  You  understand 
the  rest.  My  anxiety  was  so  great  that  this  man  could 
not  help  noticing  it.  Before  his  death,  M.  Haudric 
had  written  to  him  what  his  intentions  were,  but  with- 
out giving  his  own  name  or  ours.  He  knew  that  a 
little  money  had  been  left  for  him.      Two  years  he 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  73 

had  received  an  allowance,  but  after  that  nothing.  He 
guessed  it  all ;  and  for  the  last  fourteen  months  we  have 
lived  with  the  idea  that  he  would  do  what  he  has  done 
this  morning,  that  he  would  speak  to  you,  and  that 
you  would  judge  us,  condemn  us,  despise  us.  Ah ! " 
she  continued,  in  passionate  supplication,  "judge  me, 
condemn  me,  despise  me,  Eugene,  but  not  your  father! 
Spare  him.  He  is  not  guilty,  I  swear  to  you.  It  was 
I  who  planned  it  all  and  carried  it  all  out.  I  am  the 
only  guilty  one.  The  good  God  knows  this,  and  the 
proof  is,  that  He  has  permitted  you  to  find  me  alone 
here.  I  should  not  have  dared  to  ask  Him  for  that. 
It  was  more  than  I  deserved.  But  He  has  forgiven 
me  now,  I  am  sure  of  it.  I  have  suffered  so  much. 
I  can  bear  it  now.  I  can  go  to  confession  and  com- 
munion.     Ah,  Eugene,  have  pity  upon  your  father ! " 

"I  have  not  the  right  to  judge  either  you  or  him," 
Eugene  said.  This  man,  habituated  by  his  profession 
to  contact  with  suffering,  was  entirely  overcome  before 
this  abyss  of  misery,  on  whose  edge  he  had  lived  all  his 
youth  without  seeing  it,  or  even  suspecting  it.  Neither 
had  he  suspected  the  frenzy  of  this  mother's  love,  whom 
he,  of  all  men,  could  not  possibly  condemn.  He  had 
before  him  a  human  heart  laid  bare,  bleeding  —  and 
whose?  That  of  his  own  mother.  How  had  she  suf- 
fered, this  poor  soul ;  and  how  repentance  and  faith  had 
marked  her  with  their  strong  touch !  How  in  her  secret 
punishment  she  had  been  washed  from  her  sin!     She 


74  THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING 

accepted  all  her  chastisement,  she  claimed  it  all,  taking 
everything  upon  herself,  only  eager  to  expiate  for  both, 
anxious  to  spare  her  accomplice  —  the  old  companion  of 
her  life  —  this  death-blow  which  had  now  fallen  upon  her. 
In  what  recess  of  his  heart  could  her  son  have  found  the 
strength  to  judge  her,  or  to  act  otherwise  than  he  did 
act  ?     He  went  to  her,  and  clasping  her  in  his  arms,  — 

"Mamma,"  he  said,  "my  dear  mamma,  suffer  no 
longer,  weep  no  longer.  All  can  be  wiped  out,  can  be 
made  good.  I  shall  be  a  rich  man.  I  will  pay  the 
money  back.  I  will  save  this  unhappy  man.  Look 
at  me.  Smile  once  more.  You  know  you  can  believe 
what  I  say.  I  swear  to  you  that  I  have  in  my  heart  for 
you  nothing  but  affection  and  respect.  Your  tears  have 
washed  everything  away,  and  I  will  do  what  remains 
to  be  done.  And  we  shall  all  be  happy,  I  promise  it 
to  you." 

She  had  laid  her  head  against  the  young  man's 
shoulder,  and  she  heard  him  through  without  making 
any  reply,  only  shaking  her  poor  white  head,  with  a 
gentle  movement  that  seemed  to  say  "no"  to  those 
hopeful  promises  —  the  resigned  "  no  "  of  the  dying  to 
whom  one  talks  of  excursions  that  they  will  never  make, 
of  pleasures  that  they  will  never  enjoy.  And  this  mute 
negative  expressed  so  fully  the  truth  of  an  irremediable 
distress  that  at  last  he  was  silent  too,  still  keeping 
the  old  head  against  his  shoulder,  with  many  a  caress, 
until  suddenly  a  well-known  sound  made  them  separate 


THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING  75 

abruptly.  A  hand  was  introducing  a  key  into  the  lock  in 
the  door  of  entrance.    It  was  the  father,  returning  home. 

"Courage,  mamma,"  Eugene  said,  "I  promise  you 
that  he  shall  not  know  —  " 

"And  I  kept  my  promise,"  he  said  to  me,  when  we 
met  later,  and  he  related  to  me  all  that  had  taken  place, 
"  with  what  difficulty  you  may  imagine.  I  went  into  the 
next  room  to  dry  my  eyes  and  tranquillize  my  face. 
Then  I  heard  my  father's  voice,  asking,  'Eugene  is  here  ? 
That  is  his  hat.'  And  my  mother  said,  '  Yes,  he  is  look- 
ing for  a  book  in  the  library.  It  was  very  fortunate 
that  he  came  in  this  morning ;  I  was  very  ill  after  you 
went  out.  He  has  been  questioning  me.  But  it  is  noth- 
ing.' Her  pious  falsehood  gave  me  an  excuse  for  appear- 
ing with  red  eyelids  and  signs  of  distress  in  my  face. 
Otherwise  my  emotion  must  have  betrayed  me.  I  left 
them  immediately.  I  could  bear  the  strain  no  longer. 
Would  you  believe  this,  it  was  the  first  hour  of  my  being 
alone  that  was  the  hardest  of  all.  I  walked  on,  uncon- 
sciously, not  knowing  whither  I  went.  I  could  have 
wished  to  get  away  from  myself,  never  to  encounter  my 
own  thoughts  again.  It  seemed  to  me  that  they  were  no 
longer  mine,  that  I  had  stolen  them,  had  stolen  my  intel- 
lect, my  ideas,  all  the  best  that  is  in  me.  These  years 
of  study  that  had  made  me  what  I  am,  this  science  that 
I  had  so  loved,  this  culture  I  was  so  proud  of — I 
repeated  to  myself  that  it  was  all  stolen,  stolen,  stolen; 
that  I  had  had  it  all  at  another's  expense ;  with  another's 


76  THE   DAY   OF  RECKONING 

money ;  and  that  other,  I  saw  him  again  in  my  thoughts 
in  that  vile  room,  with  his  degraded  face,  speaking  those 
brutal  words,  and  all  his  debasement  recoiled  upon  me. 
In  vain  I  said  to  myself  what  my  mother  had  said  to  me : 
that  I  was  not  responsible  for  it.  There  are  things  that 
no  more  admit  of  argument  than  life  or  death.  It  is  so, 
or  it  is  not  so.  This  responsibility  was  upon  me,  was 
within  me.  If  you  chanced  to  learn  that  a  jewel  which 
had  been  given  to  you,  a  ring,  had  been  obtained  by  a 
murder,  you  would  not  wear  it  for  a  moment,  you  would 
pluck  it  off,  you  would  throw  it  from  you,  that  you  might 
not  have  blood  upon  your  hands.  But  in  my  case,  can  I 
pluck  out  my  brain,  and  with  it  all  that  comes  to  me 
from  this  other  man's  murder?  For  it  is  a  murder  — 
what  they  have  done!  There  are  other  ways  of  assas- 
sinating besides  with  a  pistol  or  with  poison.  You  can 
kill  a  living  creature  by  taking  from  him  all  that  would 
have  made  him  live.  It  was  this,  at  the  first  moment, 
that  maddened  me  with  shame  and  grief;  that  this 
stolen  money  had  become  part  of  myself,  of  my  mind ; 
that  I  could  not  give  back  these  funds  which  had  been 
thus  misused  for  my  benefit.  But  I  will  restore  them ; 
I  will  do  it!" 

"  Now  you  are  reasonable,"  I  said ;  "  your  poor  mother 
was  right  when  she  said  to  you  that  you  were  not  respon- 
sible for  what  they  had  done  for  you,  she  and  your 
father.  Believe  me,  your  duty  is  perfectly  simple,  and 
you  discovered  it  at  once  when  you  followed  the  guid- 


THE   DAY  OF   RECKONING  77 

ance  of  your  heart,  which  led  you  to  have  pity  upon 
your  mother,  to  spare  your  father's  old  age  this  mortal 
grief,  and  to  relieve  the  poor  fellow  in  the  Faubourg- 
Saint-Jacques.  You  owe  to  him,  first  of  all,  a  restitu- 
tion of  the  money  which  is  his,  and  then  to  assist  him  to 
free  himself  from  this  terrible  slavery,  to  cure  him  of 
the  alcohol  habit  into  which  he  has  fallen,  into  which 
he  would  have  fallen,  whether  poor  or  rich,  you  may  be 
certain.  If  you  succeed  in  this,  you  will  be  clear,  upon 
my  honour ! " 

"No,"  he  said,  and  I  saw  in  his  steadfast  eyes  that 
same  admirable  ardour  of  spiritual  life  which  had  made 
me  his  friend  at  once,  on  that  day  in  the  Luxembourg 
garden;  "no,"  he  insisted,  "that  is  not  enough."  And 
as  if,  by  a  mysterious  mental  telepathy,  at  this  moment 
of  solemn  confidence,  the  same  thought  came  back  to  the 
minds  of  both  of  us.  "  You  remember,"  he  said,  "  when 
we  met  each  other  again,  after  we  had  left  school,  our 
discussions  about  ideas  and  the  reasons  which  had  led 
me  to  begin  the  study  of  medicine  ?  I  said  to  you 
that  I  hungered  and  thirsted  after  certainty,  and  that 
I  believed  I  had  found  it,  in  a  kind  of  alternative, 
after  the  manner  of  Pascal.  Do  you  remember  it?  I 
dreamed  of  a  way  to  pass  my  life  that  would  be  jus- 
tifiable whether  there  were  or  were  not  a  God ;  whether 
or  not  free  agency;  whether  another  life  or  annihi- 
lation. Well!  I  have  come  to  a  moment  when  this 
double  hypothesis  is  no  longer  possible  to  me.     I  am 


78  THE  DAY  OP   RECKONING 

driven  into  a  choice  between  tlie  alternatives.  You 
speak  of  money  restored  and  of  care  bestowed.  But 
though  I  should  pay  this  man  the  amount  twenty  times, 
thirty  times,  a  hundred  times  over,  though  I  should  be 
able  to  rescue  him  from  his  frightful  vice,  how  shall  I 
restore  to  him  his  youth,  all  his  lost  possibilities,  how  re- 
pair the  irreparable?  If  there  is  no  God,  this  is  my 
condition.  But  if  there  be  a  God,  and  if  human  action 
has  another  horizon  than  ours,  I  might  merit  something 
for  this  wretched  man.  This  is  not  the  first  time  that 
this  idea  has  haunted  me.  Since  I  have  seen  the  sisters 
in  hospitals,  taking  care  of  the  patients,  with  no  other 
support  than  the  idea  that  they  were  meriting  for  others, 
I  have  reflected  much  on  what  theologians  call  reversi- 
bility. The  whole  question  is.  Does  experience  show  us 
this  phenomenon  in  nature,  or  does  it  not?  For  some 
years  it  has  seemed  to  me  the  sole  interpretation  of  very 
many  things,  and  I  defy  you  to  explain  otherwise  the 
severe  trial  from  which  I  now  suffer.  Yes,  or  no? 
Am  I  smitten  for  my  parents'  crime  ?  And  this  Robert 
himself,  of  what  is  he  the  victim  but  of  his  father's 
wrong-doing?  How  many  of  these  allotments  have  I 
seen !  And,  behind  them,  there  must  be  a  Power  which 
allots.  If  there  are  reversions  of  evil,  there  must  be  also 
a  reversion  of  good.  These  are  not  theories,  they  are 
experience.  And  a  matter  of  experience,  also,  is  this 
inevitable  justice,  in  terror  of  which  ray  poor  mother  has 
lived  these  ten  years  —  by   which  she  has  now  been 


THE  DAY   OF   RECKONING  79 

stricken  down,  through  me,  as  she  says.  Behind  justice, 
there  must  be  a  judge.  Behind  the  day  of  reckoning,  a 
creditor." 

"  And  you  infer  ?  "  I  said. 

"  I  infer,"  he  rejoined,  "  that  if  there  is  no  God  I  can- 
not make  good  the  loss.  I  can  if  He  exists.  Ah  !  would 
that  I  could  believe  in  Him,"  he  added,  with  a  sigh  that 
I  still  hear  after  sixteen  years. 


Yes,  it  is  now  sixteen  years  since  Eugene,  under  the 
immediate  stroke  of  the  events  which  I  have  related, 
expressed  to  me  these  convictions,  whose  logic  I  do 
not  discuss ;  and  in  these  sixteen  years  he  has  arrived, 
through  what  inner  storms  I  have  never  known,  at 
the  solution  which  he  indicated  to  me  in  this  conver- 
sation—  a  solution  which  he  so  passionately  desired, 
while  as  yet  his  mind  did  not  fully  surrender  to  those 
reasons  of  the  heart  that  cried  out  in  him.  I  repeat 
what  I  said  at  first :  I  am  but  a  witness  narrating, 
and  expressing  no  opinion.  Eugene  to-day  has  neither 
father  nor  mother.  Both  are  dead :  she,  appeased  by 
her  son's  forgiveness ;  he,  having  never  suspected  that 
his  son  knew  all.  Pierre  Robert  is  dead,  also,  although 
Corbieres  strove  hard  to  preserve  his  life.  And  Cor- 
bieres  himself  his  colleagues  saw,  with  an  amazement 
that  years  have  not  dispelled,  shortly  after  these  three 


80  .  THE   DAY   OF   RECKONING 

deaths,  which  occurred  in  rapid  succession,  abandon 
his  envied  position  as  hospital  physician,  his  important 
Parisian  clientele,  the  certainty  of  honours  of  every 
kind,  to  enter  the  congregation  of  the  Brethren  Saint- 
Jean  de  Dieu,  devoted,  as  is  well-known,  to  the  service 
of  the  sick.  I  was  far  away  from  Paris  at  the  time 
of  this  decision,  and  it  is  easy  to  see  that,  in  any 
case,  I  should  never  have  ventured  to  question  him. 
We  have  not  ceased  to  see  each  other,  however,  and 
when  by  chance,  in  travelling  in  the  south  of  France, 
I  pass  through  Marseilles,  where  the  Order  has  a  large 
house,  I  never  fail  to  visit  their  hospital,  and  to  see 
Father  Saint  Kobert.  Under  the  black  robe  of  the 
brethren,  I  find  my  old  fellow-student  in  philosophy, 
the  savant  destined  to  a  European  renown,  the  child 
of  the  two  poor  parents  whom  parental  love  led  into 
crime.  And  at  each  visit  I  find  him  more  and  more 
tranquil,  more  and  more  irradiated  by  that  certainty 
which  he  so  eagerly  sought,  with  a  freer  expression 
in  his  eyes,  which  are  still  singularly  youthful.  And 
I  comprehend  two  things :  first,  that  he  has  now  entire 
and  absolute  faith ;  and  next,  that,  in  putting  his  science 
at  every  one's  service,  a  wealth  lavished  because  he 
does  not  regard  it  as  his  own,  he  has  discovered  what 
was  perhaps  the  only  way  to  solve  the  saddest  problem 
I  have  ever  seen  set  before  a  man.  He  makes  good 
the  trust  to  which  his  parents  were  unfaithful ;  and, 
since  he  remains  even  under  his  frock  a  lover  of  classic 


THE   DAY  OF   RECKONING  •  81 

souvenirs,  he  quotes  to  me  sometimes  —  it  would  be 
his  only  proselytism,  if  there  were  not  his  example  also 
—  the  saying  of  the  Phoenician  merchant,  cast  by  storm 
upon  the  shore  of  Attica,  where  he  meets  a  philoso- 
pher, — 

"  I  came  to  port  in  making  shipwreck." 

Of  all  the  men  of  my  generation,  I  have  never  been 
sure  whether  it  were  he  whom  I  pitied,  or  whom  I 
envied,  the  most. 

Decembeb,  1898. 


II 

OTHER  PEOPLE'S  LUXURY 


II 

OTHER  PEOPLE'S  LUXURY 
I 

A   PARISIAN   family:    THE   HUSBAND 

Ir  you  read  many  newspapers  —  and  who  of  us,  now- 
adays, has  not  this  habit  of  wasting  one  hour  of  his 
morning  and  another  of  his  evening  to  discover  in  half 
a  dozen  journals  the  same  inaccurate  information,  the 
same  ardent  sophistry,  the  same  unjust  partialities?  — 
you  will  have  seen  a  hundred  times,  a  thousand  times, 
the  names  of  M.  and  Mme.  Hector  Le  Prieux.  Both 
of  them  figure,  and  with  good  reason,  in  the  front  rank 
of  those  who  are  called  by  common  consent  Parisian 
notabilities :  he,  as  one  of  the  veterans  of  the  dramatic 
feuilleton  and  chronique  boulevardidre,  she,  though  the 
wife  of  a  mere  journalist,  as  a  fashionable  woman,  who 
gives  grand  dinners  that  are  mentioned  by  the  daily  press, 
and  is  never  absent  from  the  first  performance  of  a  new 
play  or  the  opening  of  an  exposition  or,  in  short,  from  any 
of  those  functions  where  that  special,  indefinable  "All 
Paris  "  which  foreigners  and  people  from  the  country 
dream  about  is  on  view.      This   "All  Paris"    is  not 

85 


86  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

"  society  " ;  the  elements  which  make  it  up  are  too  com- 
posite for  this  heterogeneous  mixture  ever  to  repre- 
sent, even  imperfectly,  the  world  of  fashion.  Still,  it 
is  a  world,  and  has  its  exclusions,  its  manners,  its 
hierarchy.  The  "beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux,"  as  she 
is  still  called,  despite  her  forty  years  and  over,  must 
be  surely  one  of  its  queens,  if  this  royalty  be  decreed 
from  frequency  of  mention  in  the  reports  of  this  almost 
daily  parade.  But  to  be  very  celebrated,  it  has  been 
said,  is  to  be  misunderstood  by  a  great  number  of  people. 
The  seeming  paradox  is  as  true  of  this  odd  Parisian 
celebrity  as  it  is  of  celebrity  of  every  other  kind.  Do  you 
sometimes  take  the  trouble  to  think  of  the  married  life 
that  two  persons,  so  plunged  in  the  social  whirl  as  the 
Le  Prieux,  are  likely  to  have  —  when  you  read,  nearly 
every  day,  the  wife's  name  in  the  "  Society  Notes,"  and 
the  husband's  at  the  foot  of  an  article.  If  you  do,  I 
will  wager  that  these  are  the  images  which  present 
themselves  to  your  mind:  him  you  imagine  after  the 
legendary  type  of  the  houlevardier,  —  of  doubtful  fidel- 
ity as  a  husband,  more  or  less  a  man  of  pleasure,  duel- 
list, frequenter  of  green-rooms  in  second-class  theatres, 
habitue  of  gambling  saloons ;  her  you  fancy  after  the  no 
less  legendary  type  of  the  Parisienne  in  fashionable  novels, 
thoughtless  even  to  "  bad  form,"  if  she  be  not  absolutely 
disreputable.  You  are  ready  to  believe  anything  of 
them  except  that  the  brilliant  Bohemianism  of  such  a 
couple  can  be  legitimately  associated  with  the  idea  of 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  87 

a  hearth  and  a  home.  And  in  thus  thinking  you  are 
at  once  right  and  wrong,  as  is  usually  the  case  when 
opinions  are  too  broadly  generalized.  You  are  wrong 
as  to  this  individual  instance,  for  Hector  Le  Prieux, 
journalist  though  he  be,  is,  at  the  same  time,  the  very 
best  husband  that  ever  a  respectable  and  anxious  middle 
class  father  could  have  wished  for  his  "young  lady"; 
and  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  in  respect  to  conjugal  fidelity,  is 
the  most  irreproachable  of  wives.  You  are  right  as  to 
the  principle,  as  to  the  paucity  of  chances  for  serious 
and  solid  happiness  that  married  life  offers,  lived  under 
such  conditions  and  in  such  an  atmosphere. 

The  domestic  life  of  the  Le  Prieux  rests,  indeed, 
upon  an  anomaly,  which  must  be  explained  in  order 
to  render  intelligible  the  little  emotional  drama  to 
which  these  first  reflections,  and  those  which  are  to 
follow,  form  the  long,  but  needful,  preamble.  More- 
over, to  relate  the  history  of  this  couple  will  give  to 
this  very  simple  little  story  its  full  value  as  a  social 
lesson.  The  reciprocal  situations  of  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
and  her  husband  do  not  result  from  the  husband's 
rather  unusual  profession.  If  he  were  making  at  the 
Bourse,  in  business,  or  in  manufactures,  the  twelve  or 
fourteen  thousand  dollars  a  year  that  he  now  earns 
by  the  heavy  labour  of  journalism,  the  singularity 
of  his  relations  with  his  wife  would  be  quite  the  same. 
This  strange  household,  whose  desolating  scourge  is,  we 
shall  see,  that  special  malady  of  the  day,  the  passionate 


88  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

desire  for  the  same  luxury  that  others  have,  is  exceptional 
only  in  its  circumstances.  This  desire  to  shine  to  the  very 
extremity  of  one's  means,  this  wish  to  rise  above  one's 
class,  to  equal,  in  every  respect  and  at  any  price,  in 
their  mode  of  living,  their  surroundings,  their  pleasures, 
those  whose  station  is  next  higher  than  one's  own, 
what  else  is  this  but  an  individual  form  of  the  great 
democratic  degeneracy  ?  One  hesitates  to  use  expres- 
sions so  serious  when  it  is  a  question  of  such  an  every- 
day incident,  and  of  people  who  believe  themselves  so 
simple  and  natural.  But,  if  you  reflect,  the  broad 
changes  in  manners  which  history  records  are  nothing 
more  than  this :  an  indefinitely  multiplied  addition  of 
minute  individual  habits,  like  a  vast  tide,  which  is  nothing 
more  than  the  advance  of  many  milliards  of  tiny  waves. 

At  the  moment  when  begins  this  drama,  without 
great  events  and  yet  tragic,  of  which  I  speak,  that  is  to 
say,  in  the  month  of  January,  1897,  this  family,  the 
Le  Prieux,  had  already  been  in  existence  twenty-three 
years.  Hector  —  at  that  time  Leprieux  in  one  word,  so 
spelt  before  it  began  to  figure  in  the  "  Society  Notes  " 
—  having  married  Mile.  Mathilde  Buret  in  1874.  The 
marriage  was  celebrated  in  a  very  simple  way,  and  was 
far  from  giving  any  hint  of  the  future  elegance  of  the 
"  beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux,"  —  in  two  words.  Scarcely 
was  the  ceremony  mentioned  by  the  two  newspapers  on 
which  the  journalist  was  at  that  time  employed.  This 
reticence  had  been  desired  by  Hector  himself,  anxious 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  89 

to  avoid  all  allusion  to  the  recent  financial  disaster 
in  which  the  father  of  his  fiancee  had  perished.  So 
many  occurrences  of  this  kind  have  taken  place  since 
then!  No  one,  assuredly,  remembers  to-day  that  dar- 
ing Armand  Duret  who,  just  before  and  just  after 
the  fall  of  the  Empire,  set  on  foot  such  extensive 
and  venturesome  enterprises,  founded  with  so  much 
flourish  the  Credit  Departemental,  displayed  such  inso- 
lent luxury,  controlled  so  many  newspapers,  and  ended 
in  a  horrible  scandal,  with  ruin  and  suicide. 

The  widow  and  daughter  of  this  unfortunate  speculator 
were  but  just  able  to  secure,  after  his  death,  a  little 
income  of  eight  hundred  dollars,  no  more  than  enough 
to  keep  them  from  dying  of  hunger  amid  the  few  pieces 
of  furniture  that  had  escaped  the  hammer  of  the  auc- 
tioneer and  appraiser.  On  his  part,  his  work  for  the 
two  newspapers  gave  Hector  a  thousand  dollars  a  year, 
as  follows:  on  one  of  his  two  journals  he  had  the  posi- 
tion of  reporter  of  the  courts,  with  a  salary  of  four  hun- 
dred and  eighty  dollars ;  to  the  other  he  furnished, 
under  an  assumed  name,  a  semi-weekly  courrier  de  Paris, 
at  five  dollars  the  article,  —  to  wit,  five  hundred  and 
twenty  dollars  annually.  Three  farms,  leased  in  cooper- 
ative farming,  which  he  had  the  good  sense  to  retain  in 
the  Bourbonnais,  his  native  province,  represented  the 
least  aleatory  but  most  slender  portion  of  his  income, 
bringing  in,  on  average,  a  hundred  and  eighty  dollars 
yearly.     These  figures  sufi&ce  to  explain  why  it  was  at 


90  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

once  decided  that  the  young  couple  should  live  with  the 
mother.  The  two  women  demonstrated  to  the  journal- 
ist, profoundly  ignorant  of  the  affairs  of  everyday  life, 
that  there  was,  in  this  family  combination,  a  certainty  of 
economy.  Mme.  Duret,  the  widow,  insisted,  above  all, 
on  the  necessity  of  avoiding  the  purchase  of  new  furni- 
ture. Up  to  the  time  of  his  marriage.  Hector  had  occu- 
pied a  furnished  room  in  a  little  hotel  in  the  rue  des 
Martyrs,  near  his  two  newspaper  offices. 

"  Mamma  is  so  kind !  She  will  let  me  have  her  salon 
for  my  day,^^  Mathilde  had  said,  with  a  gratitude  that 
moved  her  lover  to  tears,  while  he  might  have  perceived, 
in  this  simple  phrase,  what  a  conception  of  their  joint 
future  his  fiancee  already  had.  But  where  could  the 
young  man,  who  did  not  know  the  true  price  of 
anything,  have  learned  to  understand  character, — the 
most  difficult  lesson  of  all?  Himself  an  orphan,  he 
had  no  person  who  could  outline  for  him,  in  advance, 
the  curve  of  his  conjugal  future,  and  indicate  to  him 
what  serious  consequences  would  result  from  little  faults 
of  generalship  made  early  in  his  married  life.  Every- 
thing contributed  to  render  him  the  slave  that  he  was 
destined  to  remain  his  life  long,  without  being  conscious 
of  it :  his  being  thus  alone,  then  his  education,  his  turn 
of  mind  and  feeling,  everything,  even  to  his  race,  even 
to  those  first  hereditary  traits  of  temperament,  which  are 
all  the  stronger  in  us  because  we  ourselves  are  scarcely 
conscious  of  them. 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  91 

I  have  said  that  Le  Prieux  —  to  give  him  hence- 
forward the  semi-ennoblement  of  the  separate  Le  —  was 
a  native  of  the  Bourbonnais.  His  very  name  betrayed 
his  native  province.  In  the  patois  of  Central  France, 
the  peasant,  fluent  of  speech,  who  is  sent  to  carry 
wedding  invitations  from  hamlet  to  hamlet,  is  called 
to  this  day  a  pneux  or  a  sermonneux.  Was  this  rdle  of 
rustic  messenger  filled  with  special  unction  by  one 
of  Hector's  peasant  ancestors  ?  The  modest  archives  of 
Chevagnes,  his  native  village,  bear  no  testimony  to  such 
a  fact.  They  do,  however,  attest  that  the  Leprieux 
have  been  known  at  Chevagnes  for  many  generations 
with  this  sobriquet  as  a  patronymic.  They  must  have 
lived  there  for  many  centuries,  for  their  descendant  — 
with  his  head  broader  than  it  is  long,  his  rather  flat  face 
with  its  round  chin,  his  smooth  hair  remaining  reddish 
brown  under  the  gray,  his  brown  eyes,  his  powerful  neck 
and  broad  shoulders,  his  solid  torso  and  short  stature  — 
presents  the  perfect  type  of  the  Keltic  peasant  who 
occupied  this  part  of  France  when  Csesar  appeared  here. 
It  is  an  autochthonous  race,  whose  characteristics  remain 
strikingly  the  same  through  history :  a  sagacious  mind, 
without  strong  creative  imagination,  a  will  patient  but 
without  initiative,  what  scholars  now  call  the  gregarious 
spirit,  a  desire  not  to  act  alone  and  almost  a  necessity  for 
being  led.  It  is  true  that  it  is  dangerous  to  generalize 
in  respect  to  characteristics  like  these.  And  still,  the 
annals  of  Auvergne  and  the  Bourbonnais  seem  fully  to 


92  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

justify  us  in  this  generalization.  lu  the  case  of  this 
latter  province,  —  with  which  we  are  especially  con- 
cerned, through  one  of  the  humblest  of  her  sons,  —  the 
predominance  of  the  Keltic  element  impresses  an  evident 
unity  upon  her  history.  Who  sprang  from  this  province, 
during  the  long  period  of  the  Middle  Ages  and  the 
ancient  regime,  when  local  independence  gave  scope  for 
a  freer  expansion  of  native  powers  ?  There  were  almost 
no  great  soldiers,  or  very  few ;  almost  no,  or  very  few, 
great  artists  —  as  if  the  race  were  repugnant  to  such 
excessive  development.  On  the  other  hand,  men  of 
prudent  minds,  lawyers  and  churchmen,  were  very  nu- 
merous. When  a  man  is  of  his  native  land  to  the 
degree  that  Hector  is,  its  virtues  and  its  defects  always 
reappear,  even  though  he  spend  his  life  amid  surround- 
ings and  follow  a  profession  the  most  opposed,  it  would 
seem,  to  this  influence  of  the  ancestral  soil.  Eead  one  of 
Hector's  dramatic  feuilletons,  or  one  of  his  Causeries 
Parisiennes,  and  you  will  find  the  cautious  mind,  the 
narrow  view,  the  judicial  spirit,  timidity,  a  slightly  dull 
accuracy,  and  a  somewhat  paltry  sagacity.  His  is  a 
talent  which  too  early  lost  its  venturesomeness,  and  a 
character  which  too  early  became  enslaved. 

While  a  passivity  of  soul,  altogether  hereditary  with 
Hector,  explains  why  the  household  authority  must  im- 
mediately have  belonged  to  his  wife,  an  enigma  comes 
before  us  which  must  be  solved  before  showing  this 
control  of  Mme.  Le  Prieux  over  her  husband's  sayings 


OTHER   PEOPLE  S   LUXURY  93 

and  doings :  why,  with  this  innate  lack  of  the  spirit  of 
enterprise,  —  out  of  the  many  safe  public  careers  with 
fixed  salary  and  pension,  which  are  open  in  our  time  to 
the  Frenchman  of  sheeplike  tendencies,  —  choose  the 
most  adventurous,  the  most  fruitful  in  things  unex- 
pected, the  least  conformed  to  respectable  and  prosaic 
prudence?  But  here  also,  where  he  seemed  to  give 
proof  of  courage  and  originality,  the  young  man  had 
simply  proved  his  docility  to  influences,  and  his  lack  of 
confidence  in  his  own  strength.  And  in  this  way :  the 
most  unforeseen  of  chances  had  brought  it  about  that  the 
father  of  Hector,  established  as  a  doctor  at  Chevagnes, 
renewed  acquaintance  at  the  springs  of  Bourbon-Lancy, 
very  near  Chevagnes,  with  one  of  his  old  comrades  in  the 
hospital,  who  was  himself  living  near  Nohant,  and  was 
Mme.  Sand's  physician.  Being  invited  to  visit  the 
Le  Prieux,  the  Berrichon  doctor  talked  much  of  his  illus- 
trious patient  in  the  presence  of  Hector,  who  was  at  that 
time  finishing  his  course  in  rhetoric  at  the  lycee  de 
Moulins,  and,  like  all  the  schoolboys  of  his  age,  secretly 
composed  poor  poetry.  A  passionate  admirer  of  Lelia 
and  Indiana,  the  young  fellow  ventured,  after  this  con- 
versation, upon  the  first  bold  act  of  his  life.  (This 
present  story  will  relate  the  second.)  He  wrote  to  the 
mistress  of  Nohant  a  letter,  in  which  he  begged  her 
advice  as  to  the  direction  of  his  religious  ideas.  With 
that  admirable  generosity  of  the  pen  which  she  kept  to 
the  end  of  her  life,  notwithstanding  her  vast  literary 


94  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

labours,  George  Sand  replied  to  the  schoolboy.  She  did 
not  anticipate  that  the  four  pages  of  her  letter,  in  the  big 
round  chirography,  slightly  backhanded,  of  her  later 
years,  would  exercise  upon  the  future  of  her  improvised 
correspondent  a  most  fatal  influence.  He  replied  to  the 
letter,  and,  emboldened,  sent  her  some  of  his  verses. 
The  former  friend  of  Alfred  de  Musset  was  nearly  as  saga- 
cious about  poetry  as  she  was  about  politics.  To  make 
up  for  that,  however,  she  excelled  in  building  romances. 
She  constructed  one  concerning  the  young  Bourbonnais 
rhymester,  solely  because  he  had  embodied  in  mediocre 
verse  a  picturesque  local  legend.  She  saw  him  inaugu- 
rating in  France  that  provincial  rustic  poetry  which  had 
always  been  a  favourite  dream  with  her.  She  encouraged 
him  by  praise  —  that  dangerous,  imprudent  praise,  of 
which  famous  artists  are  not  as  sparing  as  they  should 
be.  They  do  not  measure  its  influence  upon  a  beginner's 
imagination.  A  visit  at  Nohant,  where  he  was  received 
with  the  most  cordial  good-nature,  still  further  turned 
the  youth's  head,  who  now  believed  in  his  future  as  a 
poet.  The  result  was  that,  instead  of  beginning  his  medi- 
cal studies  on  leaving  school,  as  his  father  desired,  he 
begged  to  be  allowed  to  take  up  law,  seeing  in  that  pur- 
suit an  opportunity  for  studies  less  definite  and  more  ca- 
pable of  being  harmonized  with  his  secret  wishes.  Then, 
upon  his  father's  death,  which  very  soon  followed,  the  son, 
free  to  act  his  own  pleasure,  —  he  had  lost  his  mother 
when  a  child,  —  quickly  turned  into  money  the   small 


OTHEK,  people's  luxuky  95 

inheritance  left  to  him.  In  this  first  fervour  of  hope, 
the  three  farms,  which  later  constituted  the  solid  portion 
of  his  means,  were  spared  only  on  account  of  the  diffi- 
culty of  cancelling  the  leases.  The  study  of  law,  which 
from  motives  of  economy  had  been  begun  at  Dijon,  was 
abandoned;  and  the  pupil  of  Mme.  Sand  established 
himself  at  Paris,  to  lead  there  the  life  of  a  candidate  for 
literary  fame. 

This  event  —  for  the  departure  of  young  Le  Prieux  to 
Paris  made  a  sensation  in  the  district  of  Chevagnes, 
where  the  late  doctor  had  as  many  self-styled  cousins, 
that  is  to  say,  almost  gratuitous  patients,  as  there  are 
hamlets  in  this  Bourbonnais  Sologne  —  this  event,  then, 
occurred  in  1865.  The  result  was  as  you  foresee :  once 
more  Icarus  burned  in  the  fire  of  reality  the  wax  of  his 
imprudent  wings.  In  1870,  at  the  time  of  the  war,  dur- 
ing which  he  did  his  duty  bravely  and  simply.  Hector 
had  published  at  his  own  expense  two  volumes  of  verse ; 
the  Genets  des  Brandes,  and  the  Rondes  Bourbonnaises, 
and  also  a  novel,  the  Rossigneu,  —  this  is  the  patois  name 
of  a  red  ox,  —  the  whole  composed  in  that  intentionally 
rustic  and  provincial  colouring  which  is  a  sort  of  conven- 
tionality peculiar  to  authors  who  have  come  to  Paris  for 
the  purpose  of  being  provincial.  Taking  them  all  to- 
gether, the  three  works  had  sold  to  the  extent  of  a  hun- 
dred and  fifty  copies. 

Meanwhile,  the  author  had  learned  to  his  cost  what 
brutal  positivism,  implacable  vanity,  and  base  self-inter- 


96  OTHEK   people's   LUXUEY 

est  are  concealed  under  the  pompous  declamations  or 
the  whimsical  paradoxes  of  artistic  Bohemia.  Regarded 
as  rich  —  and  truly  so,  by  comparison  —  in  the  reunions 
of  the  Latin  Quarter,  and,  afterward,  of  Montmartre, 
whither  his  literary  aspirations  naturally  led  him,  the 
country  youth  had  soon  experienced  all  the  numer- 
ous varieties  of  systematic  exploitation  which  the  argot 
of  the  beer  shops  disguises  under  the  familiar,  joking 
name  of  "  tape.''  He  had  been  the  obliging  comrade  who 
cannot  enter  a  cafe  without  five  or  six  of  the  men  present 
coming  to  sit  down  at  his  table,  to  rise,  after  long  dis- 
course upon  the  high  aesthetics,  leaving  him  to  pay  for 
innumerable  orders  whose  saucers  pile  themselves  up  in 
monumental  columns;  then,  when  the  host  of  the  pre- 
ceding evening  next  day  enters  the  cafe,  he  hears  the 
refined  aesthetes  pass  judgment  upon  his  work  and  him- 
self, with  a  "  qa  n'existe  pas "  ("  he  doesn't  exist "), 
which  plunges  like  cold  steel  into  the  most  sensitive 
region  of  his  self-love.  Le  Prieux  had  also  been  the 
"gogo"  who  takes  shares  to  the  value  of  twenty -five 
louis  in  a  review  destined  "  to  defend  young  authors," 
then  finds  in  it  some  cruelly  allusive  article  referring 
to  himself,  with  the  vexation  of  having  paid  for  being 
slashed  as  other  men  pay  for  being  commended.  He  had 
been  also,  not  once  but  fifty  times,  the  Maecenas,  at  first 
sympathizing,  later  browbeaten,  who  begins  by  opening 
his  purse  to  professional  literary  beggars ;  then,  at  his 
first   refusal,   encounters   the    insults   of  rascals   whose 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  97 

impotent    and    arrogant   laziness    he   refuses   longer   to 
feed. 

But  why  enumerate  annoyances  so  common  ?  What 
happens  less  frequently  is,  that  the  young  man  who 
experiences  them  does  not  lose  his  mental  balance. 
Fortunately,  while  Hector  was  striving  to  express  in 
prose  and  verse,  systematically  and  laboriously  made 
simple,  that  poetry  of  the  native  soil  which  he  had 
foolishly  left,  the  native  soil  wrought  in  him  unawares. 
The  wary  prudence  of  his  peasant  ancestors  interpreted 
these  strange  experiences.  He  got  out  of  them,  by 
an  obscure,  irresistible  instinct  of  self-preservation,  a 
clear  view  of  the  conditions  in  which  he  must  live, 
and  he  divined  the  surest  way  to  put  himself  in  har- 
mony with  the  conditions.  He  reflected  seriously 
during  the  cruel  campaign  of  1870,  in  the  field,  and, 
later,  in  Germany,  where  he  was  a  prisoner.  Finding 
that  he  had  reached,  without  any  result,  almost  the 
limit  of  his  small  capital,  he  became  aware  that  his 
dream  of  immediate  fame  was  chimerical.  He  judged 
himself,  as  poet  and  as  novelist;  and  while  still  pre- 
serving in  petto  a  secret  complacency  as  to  his  youth- 
ful efforts,  he  sought  to  postpone  the  realization  of  his 
ideal.  He  saw  himself  at  the  age  of  twenty-five,  with- 
out property,  without  helpful  friends,  without  a  career 
begun.  He  said  to  himself  that  he  must  devote  his 
life  partly  to  art  and  partly  to  a  profession.  Now,  con- 
sidering professions  generally,  he  recognized  that  liter- 


98  OTHER  people's   LFXTJKY 

ature  was  as  good  as  any,  if  it  were  followed  with  the 
virtues  of  assiduous  labour  and  punctuality,  which  are 
necessary  in  them  all.  Here  was  the  master-stroke  of 
the  good  sense  which  came  from  his  peasant  ancestry. 
He  said  to  himself  that  a  great  newspaper  is,  after  all, 
only  a  vast  commercial  workshop,  involving  a  certain 
quantity  of  positive  work,  regularly  executed.  He 
resolved  to  be  one  of  the  good  hands  in  one  of  these 
workshops,  and  he  carried  out  his  intention  with  a 
patience  and  a  method  no  less  worthy  of  the  old  farmers 
whose  slow  and  sagacious  energy  reappeared  in  him 
under  the  most  unexpected  of  forms. 

His  first  care  was  to  profit  by  the  forced  dispersal 
of  the  literary  groups  of  which  he  had  more  or  less 
made  part  to  isolate  himself  from  almost  all  his 
former  companions.  Then,  remembering  that  he  had 
passed  a  part  of  his  legal  examinations,  he  had  the 
courage  to  complete  his  studies,  that  he  might  be  ad- 
mitted to  the  bar  and  then  apply  for  a  place  on  some 
small  newspaper  as  chronicler  of  the  courts.  He 
obtained  it,  thanks  to  one  of  his  comrades  of  the 
beer  shop  who,  also  acting  with  good  sense,  had  gone 
into  journalism.  The  punctuality  with  which  Hector 
brought  in  his  copy,  the  precision  and  clearness  of 
his  reports,  with  which  he  took  great  pains,  the  amenity 
of  his  character,  soon  made  him  appreciated  in  this 
first  journal.  The  managing  editor  spoke  highly  of 
him  to  the  proprietor,  who  was  no  other  than  Duret. 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  99 

The  latter  desired  to  gather  about  him  human  tools, 
good  and  trustworthy  secretaries,  who  would  be  to 
him  intelligent  collaborators  in  the  political  fortune 
which  he  hoped  to  rear  upon  his  financial  fortune. 
He  made  Le  Prieux's  acquaintance.  Thus  Hector 
entered,  a  petty  reporter  newly  appointed,  and  by  the 
back  stairs,  the  princely  house  that  Duret  at  that  time 
possessed  in  the  avenue  de  Friedland.  The  specu- 
lator was  at  once  pleased  with  him,  and,  struck  by 
his  clear-headedness,  formed  the  design  of  making 
him  a  confidential  clerk.  The  tragic  circumstances  so 
well  known  and  the  collapse  of  the  Credit  Departe- 
mental,  abruptly  interrupting  Duret's  prosperity  and 
driving  him  to  suicide,  seemed  likely  to  put  an  end 
to  all  relations  between  Le  Prieux  and  the  two  women 
who  survived  this  disaster.  Such  was  not,  however, 
the  case.  He  put  himself  completely  at  the  service 
of  the  poor  widow,  who  was  only  too  happy  to 
find,  amid  the  frightful  confusion  of  this  ruin,  the  de- 
votion of  the  modest  chronicler  of  the  courts.  The 
young  man  lavished  his  services,  with  the  fervour  of 
an  ardent  admiration  for  the  beautiful  and  unfortunate 
Mathilde.  It  is  easy  to  conjecture  the  rest :  the 
increasing  intimacy,  and  Hector's  passion,  at  first  too 
timid  even  to  dare  to  hope  ever  to  please ;  the  pathetic 
gratitude  of  the  two  women ;  the  almost  frightened 
rapture  of  the  lover  before  the  suddenly  discovered 
prospect  of  a  possible  union;  and  the  result  —  an  inno- 


100  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

cent  and  delicious  idyl  whose  recollection,  a  quarter  of 
a  century  after,  made  the  heart  of  the  middle-aged 
journalist  beat  as  if  he  were  still  the  humble  beginner, 
twenty-nine  years  old,  who  superintended  the  transpor- 
tation of  his  clothes  and  his  books  to  his  mother-in- 
law's  apartment  —  a  somewhat  melancholy  apartment, 
it  is  true,  looking  into  a  courtyard,  far  out  in  the  rue 
du  Rocher  —  and  scarcely  dared  to  believe  that  his  hap- 
piness was  real. 

II 

A   PARISIAN   FAMILY  :     THE   WIFE 

But,  in  truth,  the  first  period  of  his  married  life 
was  for  Hector  completely,  absolutely  happy.  It  lasted 
about  seven  years,  and  was  the  period  during  which 
he  made  his  reputation,  during  which,  also,  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  formed  an  idea  of  her  husband's  work  which  was 
destined  to  have  an  unfortunate  influence  upon  their 
common  future.  Mathilde  was  one  of  those  women 
whose  extraordinary  stupidity  and  noble  face  make  such 
a  contrast  that  they  confuse  the  observer  without  them- 
selves having  need  to  dissimulate,  especially  if  that 
observer  be  a  lover.  Her  mother,  a  Mile.  Huguenin, 
was  a  native  of  Aix-en-Provence ;  her  father  was  the  son 
of  a  petty  trader  in  the  north.  This  crossing  of  races,  so 
frequent  in  modern  families  that  it  is  scarcely  noticed, 
has  often  for  result  an  heredity  of  contradictory   ten- 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  101 

dencies  wliicli  in  finding  tlieir  equilibrium  paralyze  each 
other.  Perhaps  the  cause  of  the  decline  of  the  race  in 
France  may  be  found  in  this  continual  mingling  of  north 
and  south,  of  east  and  west,  by  intermarriage  among 
persons  too  dissimilar  in  origin. 

From  her  father,  Mathilde  had  retained  the  desire  to 
shine,  an  implacable  selfishness,  and  that  unemotional 
nature  which  distinguishes  gamblers  of  every  kind, 
especially  those  of  the  Bourse.  From  her  mother's 
family  she  had  that  admirable  southern  type  which, 
when  it  is  very  pure,  has  all  the  fineness  and  elegance 
of  a  Greek  coin.  Her  forehead,  low  and  curving,  joined 
the  nose  in  that  almost  straight  line  which  has  so  much 
distinction,  and,  under  the  masses  of  black  hair,  her 
small  head  revealed  that  long  oval  build  in  which  is  per- 
petuated the  race  of  that  homo  mediterraneus,  that  fine 
and  supple  brown  dolichocephalus,  praised  by  anthro- 
pologists. With  this,  pretty  teeth,  white  and  regular, 
between  lips  perfect  in  their  outline,  a  firm  and  dimpled 
chin,  the  neck  set  on  like  that  of  a  figurine  of  Tanagra 
with  a  graceful  curve  at  the  back,  the  shoulders  of 
Diana,  the  figure  rather  tall  but  well  built,  the  feet  and 
hands  of  a  child,  and  that  gait  that  the  Arlesian  women 
have  rendered  legendary.  In  whatever  social  position 
Fate  has  cast  a  creature  thus  endowed  with  great  beauty, 
she  only  need  be  seen  to  exercise,  even  without  adorn- 
ment, an  irresistible  prestige.  Nothing  could  be  more 
dangerous  for  a  nature  already  inclined  by  instinct  to 


102  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

make  an  undue  use  of  her  own  personality.  An  excess 
of  continuous  admiration  quickly  abolishes,  in  the  women 
who  are  its  object,  all  capacity  of  judging.  It  is  with 
them  as  with  princes  too  much  flattered  and  artists  too 
famous.  These  victims  of  their  own  success  end  by 
making  their  me  the  centre  of  the  world,  with  a  frank- 
ness at  once  simple  and  savage.  In  the  case  of  Mathilde 
this  autolatry  had  an  excuse  :  Nature  had  completely 
denied  her  a  faculty,  less  common  indeed  than  we 
generally  suppose,  which  for  lack  of  a  better  term  may 
be  called  the  altruistic  spirit,  that  power  of  forming  an 
idea  of  another  person's  heart,  understanding  his  ideas, 
detecting  his  shades  of  feeling.  Behind  this  fine,  noble 
masque  of  an  antique  goddess  was  hidden  that  kind 
of  mind  almost  animal,  very  frequent  in  the  south, 
whose  thoughts  one  might  say  are  purely  objective. 
She  had  been  flattered  by  Hector's  devotion,  without 
perceiving  its  secret  principle  —  the  noble  pity  of 
this  poet,  all  the  more  poet  in  action  because  he 
failed  of  being  so  in  expression.  She  regarded  as 
natural  this  triumph  of  her  beauty,  and,  in  consent- 
ing to  become  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  honestly  believed 
she  was  making  a  sacrifice  to  her  mother,  who,  much 
more  reasonable  and  much  more  emotional  also,  had 
insisted  upon  this  union.  Mme.  Duret,  on  her  part, 
had  been  really  touched  by  the  treasures  of  self-abnega- 
tion of  which  she  recognized  the  existence  in  her  daugh- 
ter's suitor.     Herself  enlightened  by  cruel  experience, 


OTHER   people's    LUXURY  103 

she  saw  in  Hector  qualities  precisely  the  opposite  of 
the  faults  which  had  hurried  her  husband  to  his  fright- 
ful catastrophe.  She  had,  therefore,  implored  her 
daughter  to  accept  a  trustworthy  protector;  and  the 
latter  had  consented,  justifying  to  herself  the  humble 
character  of  this  marriage  as  a  self-immolation  to  her 
mother's  welfare.  Though  it  was  but  little  that  the 
young  man  brought  into  the  family,  still  it  was  passing 
at  once  from  eight  hundred  dollars  a  year  to  two  thou- 
sand—  enough  to  employ  at  once  a  second  servant 
and  relieve  this  poor  mother  of  part  of  her  domestic 
cares.  As  to  the  inner  drama  which  had  been  acted 
in  the  soul  of  the  poet-aspirant  —  now  an  artisan  in 
prose;  as  to  the  secret  aspirations  that  Hector  still 
cherished  of  pursuing  yet,  amid  his  mercenary  labour, 
the  composition  of  some  artistic  work,  a  collection  of 
poems,  a  volume  of  stories,  a  novel  —  Mathilde  had 
no  suspicion  of  all  this  at  the  date  of  her  marriage. 
Nor  had  she  after  twenty  years  of  married  life  and 
before  the  occurrence  with  which  this  story  deals. 
She  believed,  and  to  this  day  she  still  believes,  that 
she  has  been  the  most  irreproachable,  the  most  devoted 
of  wives.  She  takes  pride  in  having  "gained  a  posi- 
tion "  for  her  husband,  which  means  that  she  has 
something  like  five  hundred  visiting  cards  to  leave  in 
her  own  and  her  husband's  name  during  the  month  of 
January !  She  will  die  without  being  aware  that  she 
has  sacrificed  the  most  unusual,  the  most  delicate  heart 


104  OTHER    people's   LUXURY 

that  man  ever  had  to  the  most  contemptible,  the  most 
selfish  of  all  vanities  —  a  desire  to  play  the  part  of  a 
woman  of  fashion,  and  to  be  mentioned  in  these  society 
articles  of  which  I  have  spoken  as  the  "  beautiful  Mme. 
Le  Prieux."  Perhaps  you  will  no  longer  be  inclined  to 
smile  at  the  epithet  when  we  reach  the  end  of  this 
analysis  and  you  will  have  seen  to  what  real  distress  it 
corresponds. 

It  must  be  owned  that,  in  the  first  period  of  his  married 
life,  Hector  began  by  enjoying  this  vanity,  before  suffer- 
ing from  it.  It  is  very  seldom  that  family  tragedies  fail 
of  having  for  their  first  authors  the  very  persons  who 
are  destined  to  be  their  martyrs.  It  is  the  fathers  and 
husbands,  the  wives  and  mothers,  who  most  frequently 
develop,  in  their  children  or  in  the  persons  who  share 
their  conjugal  life,  the  faults  of  which  one  day  they 
themselves  will  bitterly  complain.  True  it  is  that  so 
many  faults  are  graces,  at  first,  —  falsehood  begins  as 
compliance ;  coquetry,  as  a  desire  to  please ;  hypocrisy, 
as  reserve,  and  so  on.  During  the  first  years.  Hector 
saw  with  delight  everything  working  together  in  his 
house  and  in  his  life  to  set  off  to  its  utmost  the 
beauty  of  his  young  wife.  How  could  he  but  rejoice, 
from  month  to  month,  from  year  to  year,  in  increasing 
his  labours,  that  he  might  be  able  to  double  the  income 
with  which  they  began  ?  What  a  happiness  to  give 
Mathilde  those  little  luxuries  so  natural  to  a  young  and 
beautiful  creature  that  it  was  brutal  to  deprive  her  of 


OTHER  people's  LUXURY  105 

them !  Between  a  bonnet  at  five  dollars  and  an  exquisite 
capote  at  fifteen,  between  a  dress  at  thirty  dollars  and  a 
costume,  very  simple  indeed,  at  sixty,  between  a  jacket 
or  shoes  bought  outright  and  the  same  made  to  order, 
the  difference  in  style  is  so  great,  and  the  difference  in 
money  so  little !  At  least,  how  could  it  fail  to  seem  so, 
to  a  very  loving  husband,  when  the  figures  in  his  con- 
jugal account  were  thus  translated:  three  hundred  dol- 
lars more,  annually,  under  the  item  of  toilette,  would 
mean  twenty-four  more  articles  to  write,  two  a  month, 
at  ten  dollars  each ;  or,  forty-eight  more  at  five  dollars 
each,  that  is  to  say,  one  a  week.  One  article  more  a  week, 
that  is  nothing.  And,  quite  naturally,  less  than  a  year 
after  his  marriage  the  journalist  had  added  to  his  tasks 
one  weekly  letter  each  to  two  great  country  newspapers, 
and  so  Mme.  Le  Prieux's  "  tea-gowns  "  were  provided  for, 
without  her  even  knowing  of  this  increase  of  work.  Now 
"tea-gowns,"  we  must  admit,  require,  of  course,  a  salon 
in  which  to  show  them  off.  This  salon  supposes  "  a  day  " 
—  that  "day"  about  which  Mathilde  had  immediately 
spoken  to  her  fiance.  The  "  day  "  aforesaid  supposes  a 
man-servant  to  open  the  door,  flowers  in  the  vases,  petits 
fours  in  dishes  to  offer  with  the  tea  or  chocolate,  lamps 
to  make  the  room  light.  So  many  more  expenses,  in 
respect  to  which  Hector  would  have  been  the  more 
ashamed  to  hesitate  for  the  reason  that  he  was  himself, 
also,  the  dupe  of  a  strange  retrospective  illusion.  Dur- 
ing the  period  of  his  engagement,  whenever  he  chanced 


106  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

to  notice  in  the  poor  apartment  in  tlie  rue  du  Kocher 
pieces  of  furniture  which  had  once  figured  in  the  grand 
house  of  the  millionnaire  speculator,  he  felt  an  emotion 
akin  to  remorse.  This  remorse  continued  after  his  mar- 
riage. It  was  as  if  Mathilde,  in  becoming  his  wife,  had 
sacrificed  to  him  the  possibility  of  again  beholding  these 
splendours.  It  seemed  to  him  that  this  past  of  luxury- 
gave  the  young  woman  a  right  to  a  broader  life,  more 
elegant,  more  conformed  to  her  original  habits. 

A  like  hypnotism  emanated  for  Mathilde  from  these 
pieces  of  furniture  and  these  bibelots,  wreckage  from  her 
previous  existence  —  an  existence  still  so  recent  that  the 
fall  from  this  Olympus  of  sumptuous  things  was  like  a 
dream  to  her.  The  mirage  of  former  opulence,  that 
mental  malady  common  to  those  who  have  lost  a  for- 
tune, acted  upon  her,  unconsciously  to  herself.  It  was 
to  become,  without  her  suspecting  it,  the  ruling  idea  of 
all  her  thoughts  and  acts,  and  would  lead  her  by  degrees 
to  produce  a  copy,  a  parody  rather,  of  the  life  that  would 
have  been  hers  without  the  paternal  downfall.  The 
earliest  satisfactions  accorded  to  this  nostalgia  of  the 
past  took  the  form  of  little  domestic  expenses,  which, 
taken  together,  represented  two  or  three  hundred  dollars 
more  for  Hector  to  earn.  But,  almost  immediately,  the 
occasion  offered  for  nearly  doubling  his  income;  an  illus- 
trated journal  offered  him  twenty  dollars  a  week  for  a 
chronique  to  be  signed  with  a  pseudonym.  He  took  — 
0  irony !  —  the  name  Clavaroche. 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  107 

And  now  the  man-servant  was  put  into  a  modest 
livery:  the  flowers  for  the  "day"  came  from  a  famous 
shop,  and  so  did  the  petits  fours ;  there  were  new  lamps, 
and  the  chairs  were  re-covered;  and  all  these  elegances 
ended  in  an  indispensable  change  of  residence.  From 
the  dismal  rue  du  Eocher,  the  tempter  furniture,  the 
draperies  of  evil  advice,  the  bibelots  too  loaded  with 
memories  of  the  past,  emigrated  to  a  dainty  little  new 
house  in  the  Monceau  plain,  rue  Viete.  Another  engage- 
ment, this  a  daily  one,  to  send  every  evening  a  hundred 
lines  to  a  French  newspaper  in  St.  Petersburg,  was  to  pay 
the  rent.  What  is  a  hundred  lines,  when  it  is  only  to  sum 
up,  as  fast  as  the  pen  can  move,  and  for  foreign  readers, 
news  that  one  breathes  in  with  the  air,  in  Paris !  And 
neither  Hector  nor  his  wife  took  any  note  of  this  new 
labour  added  to  the  rest. 

Two  serious  events,  however,  at  this  time  prevented 
the  Le  Prieux  household  from  going  too  far  upon  this 
expensive  road  of  mock  fashion.  One  was  the  birth  of  a 
daughter  who  was  called  Reine,  after  her  grandmother 
Duret ;  the  other  was  the  death,  after  a  very  painful  ill- 
ness, of  Mme.  Duret  herself.  The  long  detentions  at 
home  which  were  imposed  on  Mathilde,  first  by  her  con- 
dition, and  then  by  her  very  slow  recovery  after  the  birth 
of  her  child,  and  after  that  by  her  mother's  fatal  illness 
and  the  period  of  mourning,  deprived  her  of  the  opportu- 
nity to  enlarge  her  circle  of  acquaintances.  This  circle, 
at  that  time,  was  quite  limited.     Not  being  Parisians  by 


108  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

birth,  neither  she  nor  her  husband  had  that  group  of 
relatives  in  Paris  which  cousinship  constitutes  in  the 
middle  class  as  well  as  in  the  aristocracy;  and  neither 
Hector,  in  the  humble  beginning  of  his  literary  life,  nor 
the  late  Duret,  in  the  ostentatious  displays  of  his  quickly 
gained  and  quickly  lost  wealth,  had  been  able  to  attract 
any  large  group  of  acquaintances.  The  financial  schemer 
had  had  at  his  entertainments,  when  he  gave  them,  only 
chance  guests,  almost  all  now  vanished  with  his  millions. 
There  exist,  in  Paris,  hundreds  of  these  demi-parasites, 
enigmatically  called  boscards,  by  fashionable  irony,  who 
form  an  escort  to  be  had  on  demand,  at  the  service  of 
every  fortune  ample  enough  to  admit  of  dinners  of 
eighteen  covers,  and  hunting  parties,  and  balls  with  val- 
uable gifts  as  favours  in  the  German,  and  a  box  at  the 
opera.  Among  these  professional  boscards  you  will  find 
men  of  rank,  more  or  less  damaged,  in  search  of  means 
to  repair  their  fortunes ;  intriguing  artists  in  search  of 
an  order  —  bust  or  portrait;  brokers  in  evening  dress, 
on  the  track  of  a  profitable  transaction ;  foreigners 
with  doubtful  references,  who  play  "the  gentleman" 
with  rather  too  decorative  correctness.  Add  to  this  a 
staff  of  more  or  less  compromised  women,  and  of  gam- 
blers, and,  also,  certain  very  practical  epicureans  frankly 
in  search  of  nothing  more  than  the  good  dinner,  the 
choice  cigar,  the  fine  wines,  and,  in  the  season,  pheasant 
shooting  of  the  best  kind.  This  population  of  sharpers 
is  divided  into  gangs  of  dijfferent  sorts,  more  or  less 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  109 

choice  in  quality,  according  to  the  rank  of  the  moneyed 
man  whom  it  is  proposed  to  boscarder.  The  gang 
gathered  around  Duret,  a  promoter  of  doubtful  enter- 
prises, could  have  been  only  second-rate.  It  is  the  same 
with  the  guests  of  the  nouveaux  riches  as  with  their 
maladies.  The  doctor's  remark  to  his  parvenu  patient, 
the  victim  of  excesses  at  table,  "You  are  not  entitled 
to  have  the  gout ! "  contains  a  whole  philosophy  of  the 
social  species.  The  shabby  character  of  the  boscards  of 
the  Duret  gang  was  shown  by  their  immediate  desertion 
after  his  ruin,  which  ought  to  have  disgusted  Mathilde 
forever  with  that  half-and-half  position  to  which  those 
are  condemned  who  are  determined  to  visit  and  enter- 
tain, without  having  a  position  fixed  by  birth  and  kin- 
ship. 

But  no.  This  disenchanting  experience  had  passed 
over  the  girl  without  being  of  any  profit  to  the  young 
woman.  So  true  is  it  that  vanity  will  not  learn  from 
experience,  and  precisely  because  of  the  lack  which 
the  etymology  of  the  word  indicates,  that  radical  lack 
of  solidity  and  truth,  that  desire  to  produce  an  effect, 
at  any  cost,  even  though  one  knows  the  effect  to  be 
deceitful  and  the  people  upon  whom  it  is  produced  to 
be  contemptible.  Accordingly,  the  proofs  of  cynical 
ingratitude  lavished  upon  her  mother  and  herself,  after 
their  downfall,  by  those  who  had  been  constant  guests 
at  the  entertainments  of  the  avenue  Friedland,  did  not 
prevent  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  immediately  after  her  marriage, 


110  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

from  making  everything  subordinate  to  a  recovery  of 
position.  She  lived  only  to  invite  and  be  invited,  to 
receive  and  be  received.  If  her  father,  in  his  brilliant 
days  and  with  his  millions,  had  at  his  house  only  para- 
sites of  a  low  class,  it  may  well  be  supposed  that  the 
persons  with  whom  the  wife  of  the  journalist  exchanged 
expensive  civilities  did  not  belong,  to  use  the  jargon 
of  the  day,  to  the  creme  de  la  crime,  the  gratin  du  gratin. 
There  were  three  or  four  families,  selected  among  those 
of  Hector's  fellow-journalists,  who  also  had  set  up  some- 
thing like  an  establishment.  There  were  three  or  four 
others,  recruited,  through  the  agency  of  those  just  men- 
tioned, from  among  rich  Parisian  merchants ;  for,  since 
the  profound  modification  —  or,  it  might  be  more  correct 
to  say,  the  complete  disappearance  —  of  the  great  middle 
class,  as  it  existed  still  at  the  beginning  of  the  Second 
Empire,  the  men  who  have  made  fortunes  in  business 
find  it  difficult  to  create  a  social  place  for  themselves, 
which  leads  them  to  seek  the  society,  in  some  cases,  of 
politicians,  in  others,  that  of  authors  and  artists.  There 
were  also  a  few  wives  of  lawyers,  anxious  to  secure  for 
their  husbands  favourable  notice  in  the  reports  from  the 
courts.  There  were — but  the  enumeration  of  these  gentry 
would  be  as  wearisome  as  their  companionship.  They, 
however,  composed  "  the  salon "  of  the  little  residence 
in  the  rue  Viete  —  a  gallery  to  which  Mathilde  could  act 
her  part  of  the  woman  of  fashion;  a  court  over  which 
she  could  reign ;  a  public  from  whom  she  could  receive 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  111 

that  homage  to  her  beauty  —  the  sole  true  passion  of 
her  life,  to  which  an  unforeseen  circumstance  was  about 
to  furnish  opportunity  for  development  in  a  broader 
scene. 

This  circumstance,  strictly  a  professional  one,  and  but 
little  freighted,  it  would  seem,  with  social  results,  took 
place  during  the  year  1883.  The  manager  of  a  great 
Parisian  newspaper  offered  to  Le  Prieux  the  post  of 
dramatic  critic,  left  vacant  by  the  sudden  death  of  the 
man  who  held  it.  Although  the  theatrical  letter  has 
no  longer  its  old  importance,  since  the  next  morning's 
report  takes  the  place  almost  everywhere  of  the  former 
Monday  feuilleton,  made  famous  by  a  Gautier,  a  Saint- 
Victor,  a  Janin,  a  Weiss,  a  Sarcey  in  earlier  days, — 
not  to  mention  others  still  living,  —  no  position  is 
more  eagerly  desired  by  journalists,  and  each  vacancy 
calls  out  twenty  candidates.  Le  Prieux  had  not  even 
the  trouble  of  making  application.  The  sagacious  plan 
that  he  had  formed,  in  entering  the  profession,  and  to 
which  he  still  remained  faithful,  was  fulfilled  step  by 
step.  He  reaped  the  fruit  of  that  quality  which  in  all 
professions  secures  success  —  the  technical  conscience. 
While  the  constant  appearance  of  his  name  at  the  foot 
of  articles,  all  carefully  thought  out  and  written,  brought 
him  celebrity,  he  acquired  that  mysterious  power  which 
we  call  authority  by  that  very  carefulness  of  his  work, 
by  the  fairness  of  his  judgments,  and  by  the  accuracy 
of  his  information.     A  word  will  tell  the  whole,  to  those 


112  OTHER   people's  LUXURY 

who  know  the  incredible  thoughtlessness  with  which 
newspapers  are  made  up.  Hector  had  never  written 
about  a  book  until  he  had  run  through  it.  Moreover, 
notwithstanding  his  evident  luck,  he  had  had,  in  his 
early  days,  the  gift  of  not  exciting  envy.  This  obscure 
and  implacable  passion,  the  scourge  of  the  literary  exist- 
ence, has  the  strange  perspicacity  of  attaching  itself 
much  less  to  successes  than  to  persons.  The  man  of 
great  talent  does  not  envy  the  man  of  inferior  talent  who 
succeeds  where  he  himself  has  failed ;  and  it  is  the 
inferior  man  who,  at  the  moment  even  of  his  own  vic- 
tory, will  envy  the  other  in  his  failure.  We  are  never 
truly  jealous  —  with  that  jealousy  that  seeks  to  injure 
its  object  —  of  those  whose  superiors  we,  in  our  hearts, 
believe  ourselves  to  be.  This  was  Le  Prieux's  strength, 
at  the  beginning;  neither  by  literary,  nor  personal,  nor 
social  advantages  did  he  humiliate  any  man.  Envy 
came  later,  with  the  fine  acquaintances,  the  toilettes  of 
madame,  and  her  coupe  hired  by  the  month. 

In  short.  Hector's  entrance  upon  dramatic  criticism 
would  have  passed  imnoticed,  like  himself,  had  he  not 
immediately  formed  the  habit  of  appearing  at  first  per- 
formances with  his  young  wife,  whom  very  few  of  his 
comrades  in  the  profession  knew,  as  we  have  seen.  The 
beauty  of  Mathilde,  at  this  time  scarcely  twenty-eight 
years  of  age,  was  too  brilliant  not  to  be  at  once  noticed 
in  the  well-worn  crowd  that  frequents  these  great  Pari- 
sian functions,  where,  as  has  been  said,  "it  is  always  the 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  113 

same  persons  who  are  getting  killed."  Among  all  those 
faces,  killed,  in  truth,  by  late  hours,  by  nervous  excesses, 
by  rouge  and  the  rest,  she  obtained  at  once  a  very  great 
success  as  something  new.  Hector,  as  dramatic  critic, 
did  not  at  first  have  the  box  or  the  baignoire  available 
for  invitations,  which  later  his  wife  induced  him  to  claim. 
Their  places,  at  the  TheStre-FranQais,  the  Vaudeville, 
the  Gymnase,  the  Varietes,  the  Odeon,  being  only  bal- 
cony seats,  all  the  opera-glasses  in  the  house  could  freely 
scrutinize  that  beautiful  face,  of  a  type  so  pure,  which,  in 
repose,  in  fixed  attention  to  the  performance,  was  capa- 
ble of  a  marvellous  assumption  of  emotion  and  intelli- 
gence. Mathilde  would  not  have  been  the  woman  that  she 
was  if  she  had  not  been  in  every  fibre  of  her  inmost  being 
aware  of  this  triumph,  and  desirous  to  increase  it  by  ex- 
tending it  as  far  as  possible.  Nor  would  Paris  have  been 
Paris,  had  she  not  met  among  the  habitual  frequenters 
of  first  performances  some  one  to  make  himself  the  Bar- 
num  of  this  dawning  success.  These  voluntary  heralds 
of  a  triumph  which  they  foresee,  and  enhance  by  tak- 
ing part  in  it,  abound  in  this  strange  city,  where  there 
prevails  something  like  a  mania,  a  mad  infatuation  for 
whatever  can  shine,  were  it  but  for  a  day,  in  the  change- 
ful sky  of  fashion.  There  are  those  who  cry  up  books 
and  pictures;  others,  foreign  princes  and  explorers; 
others  still,  plays  and  pretty  women.  Let  me  say  at 
once,  so  that  no  uncertainty  may  be  possible  and  that, 
at  least,  Mme.  Le  Prieux  may  incur  no  unjust  suspicion, 


114  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

the  Bamums  of  this  latter  sort  are  most  frequently 
Platonic  patitos.  They  have  usually  some  thought  at 
the  back  of  their  heads  which  has  nothing  to  do  with 
that  which  our  fathers  gayly  called  "  la  bagatelle."  If 
they  wish  to  profit  by  the  success  of  the  pretty  woman 
whom  they  seek  to  bring  forward,  it  is  for  reasons  of 
vanity  or  interest.  If  they  devote  themselves  to  her, 
it  is  very  discreetly,  as  a  father  or  a  brother,  accord- 
ing to  age.  Their  attentions  consist  in  giving,  at 
elegant  restaurants,  dinners  at  which  she  presides,  and 
where  she  meets  other  women  and  other  men,  whom 
it  is  for  her  advantage  to  know,  and  even  more  for 
the  advantage  of  her  showman  to  cause  her  to  know. 
If  the  Barnum  begs  an  appointment  with  her,  it  is 
that  he  may  accompany  her  as  escort,  and  be  seen 
with  her,  in  some  of  the  places  where  this  special 
All  Paris  is  on  view:  an  Exhibition  of  Water-colours, 
a  Flower  Show,  the  opening  of  the  Horse  Show,  or  a 
special  reception  at  the  Academy.  Usually,  also,  it  is 
not  the  patronage  of  one  elephant-driver  that  the 
pretty  woman  must  endure,  but  there  will  be  two  or 
three,  or  four  of  them,  who  watch  each  other  as  jeal- 
ously as  if  they  were  really  lovers  instead  of  being 
merely,  in  some  cases,  persons  seeking  to  promote  their 
own  interests,  and,  in  others,  only  foolish,  inoffensive 
little  "  snobs,"  of  a  species  so  peculiar  that  it  really 
deserves  a  sketch.  But  this  is  not  the  place  for  it. 
To  indicate,  to  the  eyes  of  readers  who  are  familiar 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  115 

with  the  masks  of  la  comedie  parisienne,  the  cate- 
gory in  which  belonged  the  discoverer  of  the  "beau- 
tiful Mme,  Le  Prieux,"  it  suffices  to  mention  his 
name.  It  was  Cruce,  the  celebrated  collector,  that 
adroit  sexagenarian  who,  having  lost  his  fortune  more 
than  thirty  years  ago,  obtained  the  means  to  support 
a  very  expensive  way  of  living  by  the  private  sale 
of  the  objects  of  art  in  his  collection,  indefinitely 
and  mysteriously  renewed.  He  had  been,  in  this 
character,  one  of  the  earliest  frequenters  of  the  Duret 
house;  then,  in  the  same  character,  one  of  the  first  to 
forget  that  the  ruined  speculator  —  possessor  through 
his  agency  of  some  precious,  half -false  bibelots  —  had 
left  behind  him  a  wife  and  daughter.  But  meeting 
this  daughter  again,  now  become  a  regal  beauty,  his 
memory  returned  to  him,  and  the  more  rapidly  because 
Mathilde  was  now  the  wife  of  one  of  the  great  lords 
of  the  press,  and  at  that  particular  moment  Cruce 
was  in  search  of  gratuitous  advertising  for  a  sale 
which  he  had  in  view.  He  has,  since  then,  carried  out 
this  intention ;  we  all  -remember  with  what  tact  and 
address,  and  with  what  success!  The  old  boulevardier 
had  caused  himself  to  be  again  presented  to  Mme.  Le 
Prieux,  tenderly  recalling  to  her  that  he  had  known 
her  "no  taller  than  that."  And  it  was  under  the 
auspices  of  this  self-styled  "  friend  of  the  family," 
who  would  have  been  repulsive  to  her  had  not  the 
desire  to  shine  stifled  every  other  sentiment,  that  the 


116  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

young  woman  entered  upon  her  profession  of  being  a 
great  Parisian  personality,  whose  balance-sheet  must 
now  be  shown  here.  Dry  as  figures  are,  their  brutal 
eloquence  carries  a  power  of  instruction  which  any 
commentary  would  diminish. 

In  1897,  then,  —  I  have  already  said  that  this  was 
the  period  when  the  domestic  drama  took  place  at 
whose  core  we  have  placed  these  preparatory  details, 

—  the  annual  expenses  of  the  Le  Prieux  household 
were  thus  apportioned :  sixteen  hundred  dollars  rent 
(the  little  house  in  the  rue  Viete  having  been  ex- 
changed for  a  large  apartment  in  the  rue  du  General- 
Foy,  better  suited  for  receptions)  ;  twenty-four  hundred 
dollars  for  a  carriage,  the  famous  coupe  by  the  month 

—  which  made  Hector  as  many  enemies  as  he  had 
fellow- journalists  who  went  about  in  fiacres  —  with  its 
two  horses  for  alternate  use. 

How  do  with  less  —  where  one  must  pay  visits  all  day 
and  go  out  every  evening  ?  For  wages  reckon  eight 
hundred  dollars,  keeping  the  number  of  servants  as 
low  as  possible :  a  steward,  chambermaid,  cook,  kitchen- 
maid,  a  "groom"  for  the  antechamber  or  for  errands, 
and  extras  for  dinners  and  receptions.  To  this 
add  twenty-four  hundred  dollars  for  the  toilette  of 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  and  her  daughter,  and  four  hun- 
dred for  flowers,  and  we  have  seven  thousand  six 
hundred  dollars ;  to  which  must  be  added  about  a 
thousand    for    Hector's    personal    expenses.      Notwith- 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  117 

standing  his  old  habits  of  economy,  he  is  obliged  to 
take  a  cab  for  himself  when  he  returns  from  the 
theatre,  and  the  ladies  are  using  the  carriage.  Then 
there  is  his  dress,  in  regard  to  which  his  wife  is  very- 
punctilious.  These  are  the  thousand  and  one  little 
expenses  of  his  profession,  from  gratuities  to  the 
ouvreuses  at  the  theatre  to  the  five  dollars  that  he  must 
subscribe  when  one  of  his  newspapers  makes  appeal 
to  public  charity,  with  lists  for  some  "  very  Parisian  " 
object.  We  have  reached  eight  thousand  six  hundred 
dollars.  If  now  you  take  into  account  that  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  gives  two  great  dinners  a  month,  and  that  her 
table  is  remarkably  good ;  that  she  has  three  or  four 
evenings  of  music  and  drama  every  season ;  that  her 
gifts  are  mentioned  among  the  richest  in  the  reports 
of  a  dozen  marriages;  also,  that  the  family  must  live 
the  rest  of  the  time,  that  certain  articles  of  furniture 
must  be  renewed,  and  that  there  must  be  provision  for 
unforeseen  expenses,  for  illness,  for  visits  to  the  sea- 
shore, and  who  can  tell  what  else,  you  will  acknowledge 
that  three  hundred  and  twenty  dollars  a  month  will 
be  no  more  than  just  enough,  and  we  have  slightly 
exceeded  the  twelve  thousand  a  year  which  Hector 
earns  —  an  income  which  causes  people  to  say  of  him 
that  he  has  "  arrived." 

Let  us  now  go  over  the  figures  that  represent  in  de- 
tail the  husband's  work,  insisting,  for  the  honour  of 
the  corporation  of  journalists,  by  turns  too  much  extolled 


118  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

and  too  much  calumniated,  upon  the  integrity  of  this 
hard-working  penman.  He  has  no  knowledge  of  any 
schemes  for  making  money ;  all  he  has  ever  received  has 
been  payment  for  work  delivered,  Le  Prieux  has,  first, 
twenty-four  hundred  dollars  a  year  as  theatrical  critic 
for,  on  an  average,  three  articles  a  week,  that  is  to  say, 
twelve  a  month.  He  has  left  the  courts,  naturally,  but 
is  chroniqueur  de  tete  in  another  great  journal  of  the 
boulevard  where  he  has  large  pay,  fifty  dollars  an  arti- 
cle. This  gives  him  five  thousand  two  hundred  dollars 
a  year,  for  two  articles  a  week,  eight  a  month,  that  is  to 
say.  Eemaining  faithful  to  his  early  illustrated  jour- 
nal, which  has  prospered  like  himself,  he  has  thirty 
dollars  an  article  for  a  weekly  "  Clavaroche,"  which 
means  fifteen  hundred  and  sixty  dollars  a  year,  and 
four  articles  a  month.  He  sends  a  letter  every  fortnight 
to  a  South  American  newspaper  —  once  more,  two  arti- 
cles a  month.  He  has  the  art  criticism  in  a  fifth  news- 
paper, which,  with  the  report  of  the  Salon,  requires  from 
him  about  an  average  of  thirty-six  articles  or  para- 
graphs to  be  written  during  the  year,  or,  again,  three  a 
month.  A  correspondence,  daily  and  telegraphic,  with 
the  most  important  nouvelUstes  throughout  the  country, 
completes  his  total  of  receipts,  which  balances  —  at 
least,  so  he  believes  —  very  nearly  the  total  of  expenses, 
leaving  him  enough  for  a  very  small  life  insurance. 
This  shows,  if  you  will  add  the  figures  given  above, 
an  average  of  sixty  articles  a  month,  or  seven  hundred 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  119 

and  twenty  a  year.     This  is  what  the  "  beautiful  Mme. 
Le  Prieux  "  calls  "  having  gained  a  position." 

Ill 

A   PARISIAN   family:     THE   DAUGHTER 

But  how  did  Le  Prieux  himself  regard  this  "posi- 
tion,"—  he,  George  Sand's  former  pupil,  the  man  whom 
she  used  to  call,  in  her  letters,  her  "  little  Bourbon- 
nichon,"  the  poet  of  lonely  heaths  and  misty  lakes,  who 
came  to  Paris  to  win  the  fame  of  a  Mistral  of  the  AUier, 
and  is  now  transformed,  by  hereditary  prudence,  and  then 
by  marriage,  into  a  living  machine  for  the  making  of 
copy.  Had  his  nature  also,  unresisting  and  patient  to 
the  extent  of  docility,  undergone  the  contagion  of  his 
wife's  malady,  that  fever  of  worldly  egoism  which  com- 
pels one  forever  to  compare  himself  with  his  richer  neigh- 
bour and  to  go  on  increasing  his  expenses,  complicating 
his  life,  foolishly,  sometimes  tragically,  sacrificing  the 
reality  to  the  appearance  ?  Or  did  he,  on  the  other  hand, 
remain,  in  the  depths  of  his  soul,  the  rustic,  simple- 
minded  as  before,  and  witness  the  triumphs  of  his 
Mathilde  as  a  lover  who  sacrifices  himself  with  delight 
to  the  tastes  of  her  whom  he  adores,  only  too  grateful  if 
she  deign  to  accept  the  sacrifice  ?  Or  else,  again,  had 
he  judged  this  woman,  and  did  he  now  belong  to  the 
immense  herd  of  resigned  husbands,  who  make  no  at- 
tempt to  struggle  against  the  pressure  of  circumstances, 


120  OTHER  people's  LUXURY 

against  the  irresistible  machinery  in  which  they  have 
become  entangled  ?  Very  shrewd  the  man  who  could 
have  read  the  answer  to  these  questions  in  the  face  of 
the  indefatigable  journalist.  The  young  fellow  from  the 
coimtry,  timid  and  frank,  had  by  degrees,  as  the  years 
passed,  since  1866,  changed  into  a  man  circumspect  in 
manner,  distant,  talking  but  little,  except  now  and  then 
to  relate  some  anecdote  of  Parisian  life,  in  a  tone  of  the 
undeceived  moralist,  conformable  to  the  character  that 
he  adopted  in  his  chronicles,  that  of  a  Desgenais  of  the 
upper  middle  class.  Grown  a  little  heavier  with  years 
but  always  vigorous  and  sturdy,  the  habit  of  being  on 
parade  at  the  theatre,  on  the  boulevard,  at  innumerable 
dinners  and  still  more  innumerable  receptions,  had  im- 
pressed upon  his  whole  person  that  air  of  importance 
and  prosperity,  that  almost  official  bearing  which  one 
might  call  "  I'air  ancien  prifeV  The  traces  of  his  use- 
less and  enormous  labours  were  visible  in  his  complexion, 
rendered  leaden  by  late  hours,  and  on  his  brow,  crossed 
with  long  furrows,  under  his  grayish  hair  cut  after  the 
military  fashion.  But  what  thoughts  were  astir  be- 
hind, this  fades  of  truly  administrative  coolness  ?  The 
mouth,  purposely  ironical  under  the  cropped  moustache, 
had  never  told  this,  and  would  never  tell  it. 

For  one  who  had  the  inclination  and  the  time  to 
decipher  faces  —  but  who  has  both  ?  —  Hector  Le  Prieux 
was  not  the  only  enigmatic  figure  in  his  hovise.  For 
about  two  years,  at  this  date  of  1897,  the  frequenters 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  121 

of  first  performances  had  been  accustomed  to  see,  from 
time  to  time,  when  the  play  was  of  a  nature  sviited  to  a 
young  girl,  —  a  play  "  with  marriages  in  it,"  as  the  saying 
is,  —  the  beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux  accompanied  in  her 
box  by  a  refined  and  beautiful  young  girl,  dressed 
almost  exactly  like  herself,  and  resembling  her,  from  a 
distance,  like  a  younger  sister  —  a  Cinderella,  one  might 
say.  It  was  her  daughter,  that  Eeine  who  had  almost 
cost  the  mother  her  life.  Like  most  children  born 
of  a  mother  who  has  suffered  too  severely  in  their 
ante-natal  period,  E-eine  had  a  certaiii  delicacy,  almost 
fragility,  in  contrast  with  her  mother's  opulent  beauty, 
whose  fortieth  year  showed  a  Juno-like  majesty.  The 
girl,  at  twenty-one,  scarcely  seemed  eighteen.  She  was 
fresh  and  yet  frail,  with  slender  shoulders  and  bust,  as  if 
something  hindered  the  full  blooming  out  of  her  physi- 
cal being;  while  her  look,  too  pensive  for  her  childish 
face,  had  a  disquieting  precocity  of  expression.  She  had 
her  mother's  long  oval  head,  straight  profile,  and  regular 
features ;  but  this  handsome  type  of  pure  race  was  in  her 
case  made  more  faint,  so  to  speak,  attenuated,  and  under 
her  clearly  arched  eyebrows  there  were,  instead  of  the 
brilliant  black  southern  eyes  of  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  the 
brown,  thoughtful  eyes  of  her  father.  From  this  father 
she  also  inherited  the  chestnut  hair  and  the  slightly  full 
lips,  with  a  melancholy  droop  at  the  corners  Never 
was  a  blending  of  two  tyjies  more  visible.  Was  it  to  the 
inner  hesitations,  the  seciot  contrasts  of  an  atavism  far 


122  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

too  diiplex,  that  Mile.  Le  Prieux  owed  the  singular  melan- 
choly of  her  look  ?  or  had  she,  young  as  she  was,  passed 
through  some  mysterious  trial,  and  undergone  one  of 
those  emotional  disappointments  which,  though  mainly 
imaginative,  none  the  less  profoundly  affect  a  youthfiil 
soul  ?  When  one  spoke  of  Reine  to  her  mother,  asking 
about  the  girl's  health  with  anything  like  anxiety,  Mme. 
Le  Prieux  would  reply,  — 

"  She  is  a  little  pale,  is  she  not  ?  She  develops  slowly. 
But  that  is  her  nature.  She  has  never  had  two  days' 
illness  since  she  was  a  child." 

And  if  her  mood  was  confidential,  she  would  add, — 

"I  do  not  say  it  because  she  is  my  daughter,  but  she 
is  perfection  upon  earth.  I  have  never  had  to  say  one 
severe  word  to  her  since  I  have  known  her.  I  have  only 
one  fault  to  find  with  her,  she  is  too  good.  She  is  not 
young  —  when  I  was  of  her  age,  a  ball  would  make  me 
wild  with  pleasure.  It  amuses  me  still !  She  goes  to  a 
ball  just  as  she  used  to  do  her  writing  lessons  when  she  was 
a  child.  You  would  say  she  went  as  a  matter  of  duty. 
Her  father  was  like  that,  formerly.  I  must  say  he  has 
changed  completely.  Eeine  will  change  also.  But,  for 
the  moment,  nothing  amuses  her.     It  is  extraordinary." 

And  there  was  a  kind  of  haughty  surprise  in  the  eyes 
of  the  "beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux."  You  could  divine 
in  the  straightening  of  her  figure,  impeccably  laced  in  a 
corset  of  the  latest  style,  the  conscience  of  the  wife 
and  the  mother,  maintaining  her  husband  and  daughter 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  123 

in  the  social  rank  to  which  she  had  raised  them  by  her 
unaided  efforts.  If  it  happened  that  Le  Prieux  was  pres- 
ent when  his  wife  thus  gave  her  opinion  as  to  Keine,  he 
never  failed  to  say,  shrugging  his  shoulders,  the  "Oh, 
no,  no ! "  indulgently  reproachful,  of  the  husband  who 
thinks  that  his  wife  talks  a  little  too  much,  and  he  would 
turn  the  conversation  by  one  of  his  favourite  anecdotes. 
Like  all  story-tellers,  he  has  but  a  few  of  these,  always 
the  same,  and  he  relates  them  always  in  the  same  tempo, 
with  the  same  stress  on  certain  syllables,  the  same  effects. 
This,  alas!  is  his  one  weakness,  and  the  story  is  too 
often  at  the  expense  of  some  fellow-craftsman  who  has 
committed  the  offence  of  abandoning  the  newspaper 
for  the  book,  and  gaining  from  literature  what  he  ought 
to  have  continued  to  seek  from  journalism. 

"Reine  amuses  herself  quietly,"  he  would  say,  "like 
myself,  that  is  true.  That  is  all  the  difference.  You 
like  to  be  amused  in  a  noisy  way.  But  she  is  too  bright 
and  too  sensible  to  fall  in  with  the  present  fad  of  as- 
suming to  be  bored  at  places  of  amusement,  after  having 
done  one's  utmost  to  get  there.  I  saw  that  thing  when 
it  began.  I  remember  now,  and  it  was  a  long  time  ago, 
when  Jacques  Molan,  the  novelist,  came  to  my  house  in 
the  rue  Viete,  begging  me  to  obtain  an  invitation  for 
him  to  the  Countess  Komow's  animal  party.  After 
a  good  deal  of  trouble  I  got  it  for  him  —  the  good 
countess  was  always  so  fond  of  us  !  As  it  happened,  that 
night  about  eleven  o'clock,   before   I   had  put  on  my 


124  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

costume,  I  went  down  to  the  office,  and  who  should  I 
find  there,  surrounded  by  gazing  reporters,  but  my 
Jacques  Molan,  dressed  as  a  bear,  with  the  muzzle 
pulled  over  his  head  like  a  hood,  and  his  grand, 
fatigued  air,  for  the  benefit  of  his  humble  comrades : 
'I  could  not  refuse  the  countess.  She  made  such  a 
point  of  it.  Ah,  boys !  it's  a  hard  trade,  going  into 
society ! ' " 

In  these  two  sentences:  "Reine  is  too  old  for  her 
age,"  and  "E-eine  amuses  herself  in  a  quiet  way,"  lay 
the  gist  of  hundreds  of  talks  that  M.  and  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  had  together  in  respect  to  their  child.  These  con- 
versations, so  intimate,  and  so  serious,  also,  —  since  their 
theme  was  the  character,  and  consequently  the  chances 
of  happiness  or  misery  promised  to  their  only  daugh- 
ter, —  usually  had  taken  place  in  the  coupe  which  was 
bringing  them  back  from  some  first  performance  at  the 
theatre  which  it  had  not  been  suitable  for  Reine  to 
attend.  These  were  the  only  opportunities  of  being 
alone  with  each  other  which  these  two  people  had, — 
a  devoted  couple,  nevertheless,  or  at  least  a  couple  who 
believed  themselves  to  be  so.  But,  between  the  demands 
of  society  upon  the  wife,  and  the  demands  of  copy 
upon  the  husband,  at  what  hour  could  they  have  talked 
with  each  other  long  and  confidentially  ?  The  necessity 
for  the  dramatic  critic  to  be  at  the  office  till  one  o'clock 
in  the  morning  to  compose  his  article,  or  to  finish  it  if 
be  had  begun  it  at  the  dress  rehearsal,  had  decided  them 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  125 

to  have  separate  rooms.  Hector  needed  to  be  able  to 
come  in  without  disturbing  his  wife's  sleep  when  she 
had  gone  to  bed  early;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  when 
it  was  she  who  was  late,  returning  from  a  ball  with  her 
daughter,  she  would  not  disturb  him.  Hector  could  not 
have  kept  up  with  his  enormous  tasks  without  having  his 
mornings  to  himself.  Seated  at  his  table  punctually  at 
nine  o'clock,  with  entrance  strictly  forbidden,  he  did  not 
leave  his  chair  till  noon,  at  which  time  the  greater  part 
of  his  day's  work  was  completed.  The  circumstances 
must  be  exceptional  which  would  lead  him  to  go  to  his 
wife's  room  to  take  his  black  coffee  and  boiled  egg,  and 
he  saw  her  for  the  first  time,  as  a  rule,  only  at  the  mid- 
day meal,  where  Keine  was  present  too.  Keine  also  was 
at  dinner,  on  the  rare  occasions  when  they  dined  at  home. 
At  other  hours  of  the  day  they  were  occupied,  she  with 
her  visits,  he  with  his  outdoor  work,  the  remainder  of 
his  writing,  and  his  enormous  correspondence.  Like 
another  prolific  journalist,  Le  Prieux  made  his  corre- 
spondents his  collaborators,  very  frequently  taking  their 
letters  as  subjects  for  his  own  articles.  The  evening 
belonged  to  society  and  the  theatre.  It  is  not  surprising, 
therefore,  that  the  more  serious  conversations  of  this 
married  pair  took  place  —  in  the  sole  t§te-a-tete  that  this 
existence  granted  to  these  two  victims  of  Paris  —  on  their 
return  from  the  theatre ;  and  so  it  happened  that  the  first 
scene  of  the  domestic  drama  to  which,  at  last,  I  come, 
was  played  in  the  interior  of  a  hired  carriage,  between 


126  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

the  door  of  a  theatre  and  the  door  of  a  newspaper  office. 
This  is  the  picture  before  us :  the  January  night  crowd- 
ing down  over  the  city  an  acrid  mist  through  which  the 
gaslights  can  scarcely  penetrate ;  on  the  sidewalks  the 
rapid  passing  of  shivering  pedestrians ;  the  carriage  roll- 
ing silently  upon  its  rubber  tires,  the  coachman,  his 
hands  icy  under  his  heavy  gloves,  restraining  his  steam- 
ing horse  with  jingling  bells,  who  is  looking  forward  to 
his  stable.  Behind  the  mist-covered  windows  of  the  car- 
riage, the  figures  of  Mathilde  and  Hector :  she  in  an 
exquisite  theatre  bonnet  of  delicate  colour,  her  Juno  head 
emerging  from  the  white  fur  which  lines  her  ruby  velvet 
cloak;  he  showing  within  the  otter  of  his  overcoat  the 
shirt-front  with  gold  buttons  and  the  white  waistcoat  of 
the  club-man.  You  would  say,  to  see  them,  an  idle 
couple  —  a  fashionable  man  whom  his  wife  was  on  the 
way  to  leave  at  his  club  before  returning  home  herself. 
But  the  man  is  a  hard-working  journalist  on  his  way  to 
earn  this  costly  fragment  of  luxury  by  labouring,  at  this 
hour,  over  his  proof-slips,  steaming  from  the  press. 
What  a  symbol  of  their  entire  life  is  this  midnight 
drive  across  Paris  under  these  conditions !  I  neglected 
to  say  that  the  drama  which  they  had  just  witnessed  was 
given  at  the  Odeon,  and  that  the  newspaper  on  which  Le 
Prieux  is  the  dramatic  critic  has  its  office  in  a  building  in 
that  rue  de  la  Grange-Bateliere  which  shares  with  the 
rue  du  Croissant  the  honour  of  having  seen  the  birth 
and  death  of  numberless  journals.     Mme.  Le  Prieux  had 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  127 

without  doubt  counted  upon  tlie  duration  of  this  noctur- 
nal drive  to  have,  with  her  husband,  the  conversation 
which  she  entered  upon,  as  soon  as  the  coupe,  making 
its  way  out  through  the  crowd  of  the  square,  had  begun 
moving  rapidly. 

"  Shall  you  be  long  at  the  office,  mon  ami  ? "  she 
asked. 

"  Not  very  long,"  Hector  said.  "  I  wrote  nearly 
all  of  my  article  this  morning,  following  the  great 
rule,  '  Never  put  off  till  to-morrow  what  you  can  do 
to-day.'  Nothing  has  been  changed  since  the  final 
rehearsal.  A  few  words,  to  mention  the  success  of 
the  play,  and  the  proof -slips  to  look  over  —  it  will  take 
me  a  short  half  hour.     But  why  do  you  ask  ?  " 

"Because  I  want  to  talk  with  you  about  something 
of  importance,"  Mathilde  replied.  This  lady,  even 
in  a  conjugal  tSte-a-tete,  was  always  the  "beautiful 
Mme.  Le  Prieux."  She  still  used  the  ceremonious 
"vous."  The  familiar  tutoiement  of  the  middle  class 
husband  and  wife  was  always  with  her  a  special 
grace,  something  like  a  derogation  from  her  rank  of 
goddess.  "  If  you  are  to  be  no  longer  than  a  half 
hour,  I  will  wait  for  you  in  the  carriage." 

"  Will  you  wait  ?  "  exclaimed  Le  Prieux.  "  In  that 
case  I  will  not  read  the  slips.  That  good  fellow, 
Cartier,  will  do  it  for  me."  This  Cartier  was  the 
secretary,  and,  as  Hector  had  given  him  this  position 
in  the  office,  was  naturally  willing  in  turn  to  oblige. 


128  OTHER   people's  LUXURY 

Hesitating  for  a  minute,  he  then  put  a  question  which 
was  an  ingenuous  proof  to  what  a  degree  a  certain 
idea  was  in  his  thoughts :  "  Something  of  importance  ? 
Is  it  about  Reine's  being  married  ?  " 

"It  is,"  Mme.  Le  Prieux  replied.  Then  with  the 
slightest  possible  hesitation  on  her  part  also,  and 
something  like  a  shade  of  uneasiness,  which  Hector 
remembered  later,  she  continued,  "  Why  did  you  think 
so  ?     Has  anything  been  said  to  you  ?  " 

"To  me?  Oh,  no!"  he  rejoined.  "But  when  you 
speak  in  that  tone,  what  else  could  it  be  but  some- 
thing that  has  to  do  with  Heine's  happiness  ?  You 
love  her  so,  and  you  have  so  much  reason  to  love  her. 
She  is  so  much  like  you  — " 

And  he  pressed  his  wife's  hand  with  the  extreme 
affection  which  had  just  betrayed  itself  both  by  the 
form  of  praise  and  the  tutoiement  of  his  last  few  words. 
Mathilde  had  no  need  of  these  little  signs  of  emotion  to 
know  that  this  man  of  so  faithful  a  heart  and  so  unweary- 
ing devotion  was  her  lover  as  on  the  first  day.  Was  she 
touched,  in  being  thus  made  aware,  yet  once  more,  of  her 
husband's  profound  feeling  ?  Or  again,  did  this  sponta- 
neous homage  to  the  lofty  and  precious  virtues  as  wife 
and  mother  which  she  believed  herself  to  possess, 
agreeably  titillate  some  hidden  spot  in  her  self-love  ? 
Or,  still  again,  apprehending  objections  to  the  idea 
which  she  had  been  turning  over  for  months  behind 
her  narrow,  tyrannical  forehead,  did  she  wish  to  crush 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  129 

them  at  once  ?  The  fact  remains  that  she  returned 
the  clasp  of  Hector's  hand,  and  condescended  also  to 
tutoyer  him. 

"  I  have  only  one  merit,"  she  said.  "  I  have  always 
been  a  woman  devoted  to  my  duty,  and  you  reward 
me  for  this,  I  assure  you.  Listen,"  she  continued; 
"Cruce  last  week  came  to  speak  to  me  about  this.  I 
did  not  think  it  right  to  mention  it  to  you  before  the 
matter  was  more  advanced,  not  to  distract  you  need- 
lessly from  your  work.  To-day  he  came  again,  and 
asked  me,  in  the  most  distinct  terms,  this  time,  what  we 
should  think  of  Reine's  marriage  to  yoimg  Faucherot  ?  " 

"Edgard  Faucherot?"  exclaimed  Le  Prieux.  "Fau- 
cherot  would  like  to  marry  Reine  ?  " 

"  And  why  not  ?  "  Mathilde  said.  "  What  is  it  that 
surprises  you  so  much  in  this  step  ?  For  the  Fauche- 
rots  have  taken  a  first  step,  you  see.  Cruce  did 
not  profess  to  be  an  official  envoy ;  at  most  he  was 
only  a  very  obliging  messenger." 

"  What  surprises  me  ?  "  Hector  said.  "  Why,  first  of 
all,  Faucherot  is  not  free.  Have  you  forgotten  that  only 
last  autumn  his  mother  was  complaining  to  you  of  his 
infatuation  for  that  little  Percy.  She  wanted  me  to 
advise  the  girl  to  go  to  America,  in  order  to  get  her  away 
from  Edgard.     But  there  she  still  is  at  the  Varietes  —  " 

"  This  only  means  that  he  has  given  her  up.  He  has 
broken  with  her,"  said  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  "and  just  for 
the  reason  that  he  is  in  love  with  Eeine.     Do  not  be 


130  OTHER   people's  LUXURY 

anxious  about  that,  moyi  ami.  I  have  made  inquiries 
myself.  Mme.  Faucherot  exaggerated  the  case.  Being 
a  "widow  and  having  only  one  son,  it  was  natural  that  she 
should  take  alarm.  The  young  man  simply  was  vain  of 
the  notoriety  of  being  talked  about  in  connection  with  an 
actress  who  is  the  fashion.  It  was  not  one  of  those 
liaisons  which  have  a  serious  influence  upon  the  whole 
life,  and  might  well  cause  anxiety  to  a  girl's  parents  —  " 
"That  may  be,"  Hector  interrupted,  "but  I  have 
dreamed  of  another  kind  of  souvenirs  of  youth  for  the 
man  to  whom  we  shall  give  our  charming  Reine  than 
those  of  suppers  with  that  little  Percy !  Besides,  there 
is  not  only  the  little  Percy,  there  is  the  mother.  You 
were  several  years,  you  will  remember,  before  you  would 
receive  Mme.  Faucherot.  You  see  her  now  only  through 
kindness,  because  she  is  a  good  woman  —  I  admit  that 
—  and  because  you  are  so  good  yourself.  But  if  she 
became  the  mother-in-law  of  Reine,  it  would  be  family 
relations  that  you  would  be  obliged  to  have  with  her  — 
you  who  have  been  brought  up  as  une  grande  dame" 
(He  believed  this,  the  Parisian  newspaper  man !)  "  And 
she  ?  I  don't  reproach  her  for  having  begun  as  a  sales- 
woman in  the  Faucherot  business  before  being  promoted 
to  the  rank  of  the  proprietor's  wife.  There  are  sales- 
women who  are  ladies.  But  she!  —  I  am  perfectly  right 
in  saying  that  there  is  a  strong  perfume  of  the  shop 
about  that  woman,  and  all  the  millions  of  the  late 
Faucherot  cannot  help  it.      She  has  been  able  to  take 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  131 

down  the  great  gilt  letters  that  I  used  to  see  on  the 
front  of  their  balcony  in  the  rue  de  la  Banque  when  I 
went  that  way  going  to  the  office:  Hardy,  Faucherot 
Successeur,  Sole  et  Velours,  but  she  carries  them  with  her, 
stamped  upon  her  whole  being!  She  remains  exactly 
what  she  was  behind  her  counter,  and  she  always 
will  be  that,  whatever  she  may  do,  and  with  her  ten- 
thousand-franc  horses !  She  didn't  fail  to  let  us  know 
what  they  cost,  just  as  she  tells  the  price  of  the  foies-gras 
and  the  wines  on  her  table !  And  her  invitations  to 
great  celebrities  whom  she  did  not  know  at  all,  in  the 
hope  of  getting  into  society !  And  her  blunders !  Why, 
they  are  famous.  You,  a  woman  of  society,  par  excellence, 
how  could  you  endure  them  ?  My  poor  darling,  even 
with  all  your  tact,  fine  as  it  is,  you  could  not  get  along 
with  her ! " 

Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  allowed  her  husband  to  go  on; 
he  had  acquired  from  his  profession,  it  will  be  noticed, 
a  habit  of  talking  somewhat  as  he  wrote,  in  paragraphs 
and  at  some  length ;  and  while  Mathilde  was,  as  I  have 
said,  totally  lacking  —  and  her  whole  life  showed  this 
only  too  clearly  —  in  that  comprehension  of  the  feelings 
of  another  person  which  requires  true  refinement,  she 
had  that  other  comprehension,  so  feminine  that  it  is 
woman  herself,  which  consists  in  knowing  perfectly  that 
which  the  most  refined  of  the  great  classic  poets  long 
since  called  "  Man's  weak  sides  and  his  moments."  ^ 
1 "  Sola  viri  molles  aditiis  et  tempora  iioras."  —  Vergui. 


132  OTHER  people's  LUXURY 

She  had  had  her  reason  for  not  abridging  Le  Prieux's 
prolonged  harangue.  The  main  objection  to  this  mar- 
riage, for  which  she  had  long  been  scheming,  was  not 
that  which  arose  from  the  greater  or  less  elegance  of 
Mme.  Faucherot,  of  the  house  of  Hardy,  Faucherot  Suc- 
cesseur,  Sole  et  Velours.  In  allowing  her  husband  to 
talk  freely,  she  knew  well  enough  that  he  would  finally- 
let  her  see  his  underlying  thought,  and  this  is  what 
he  did,  in  conclusion,  after  a  few  minutes'  silence,  which 
was  not  interrupted  by  her. 

"And  then,  even  if  I  could  tolerate  the  son  and  you 
could  tolerate  the  mother,  we  should  still  have  to  know 
what  Reine  thinks." 

"  Ah  I "  said  the  mother,  in  a  singular  tone,  all  sarcasm 
and  curiosity ;  "  do  you  know  what  Reine  thinks  ?  It  is 
true.  She  is  a  little  more  frank  with  you.  What  has 
she  said  to  you,  then  ?  " 

There  was  silence  again.  The  imperious  woman,  in 
her  desire  to  know  if  anything  had  been  said  to  Hector, 
had  just  touched  the  most  secret  and  sensitive,  and  also 
the  most  painful,  spot  in  the  heart  of  this  husband  and 
father,  a  spot  almost  unknown  to  himself.  In  this  respect 
resembling  all  men  with  whom  timidity  is  the  result 
not  of  circumstances  but  of  their  own  nature,  and  who 
even  feel  with  timidity.  Hector  found  himself  completely 
disconcerted  in  the  presence  of  very  reticent  persons  like 
Reine.  How  often,  in  the  eyes  of  his  daughter,  fixed 
upon  Mm,  he  had  perceived,  or  rather  divined,  a  mys- 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  133 

tery  —  thoughts  and  feelings  that  he  had  at  once  a  desire 
and  a  fear  to  understand,  perhaps  because  these  feelings 
and  these  thoughts  corresponded  to  secret  things  in  his 
own  heart  that  he  would  not  consent  to  acknowledge  to 
himself !  Yes.  He  knew  what  Reine  was  thinking,  but 
he  would  not  know  it.  He  knew  that  the  sadness  in  the 
eyes  of  this  charming  girl  came  from  a  profound,  an  in- 
finite pity  for  himself,  for  his  existence  as  a  literary 
galley-slave,  held  to  his  tasks,  why,  and  by  whom  ? 
To  answer  this  question  would  have  been  to  condemn 
some  one  whom  he  loved  with  that  ardent  affection  that 
does  not  judge,  however  conclusive  the  evidence;  and 
that  which  made  the  mystery  of  his  daughter's  thoughts 
and  feelings  more  painful  still  to  him  was,  precisely,  the 
fear  that  he  might  not  be  alone  in  suspecting  its  nature. 
And  so  this  sentence  of  his  wife's  had  startled  him,  and 
he  replied,  with  a  constrained  smile,  trying  to  feign  an 
indifference  which  he  did  not  feel,  — 

"What  has  she  said  to  me?  Why,  nothing;  abso- 
lutely nothing.  Do  not  suppose  that  she  is  any  more 
frank  with  me  than  with  you.  Besides,  when  could  she 
have  any  confidential  talk  with  me  ?  I  almost  never  see 
her  alone.  But,  without  any  words  from  her,  I  have  —  " 
an  evident  embarrassment  made  him  hesitate  for  words. 
He  repeated :  "  I  have  impressions.  And  —  since  we  are 
speaking  on  this  subject,  I  have  thought  that  I  noticed, 
if  she  preferred  any  one,  it  certainly  was  not  Faucherot." 

"  And  who  is  it  ?  "  asked  the  mother,  sharply. 


134  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

"  It  is  her  cousin,  Huguenin,"  replied  Le  Prieux ;  and, 
as  if  defending  himself  from  the  lack  of  confidence  which 
his  previous  discretion  on  such  a  subject  implied,  he 
added,  "I  repeat  to  you,  this  is  a  purely  gratuitous 
supposition.  Reine  has  never,  never  spoken  of  it  to 
me,  nor  has  Charles.  You  may  be  sure  I  should  have 
mentioned  it  to  you  at  once." 

"In  any  case,"  said  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  with  a  slight 
shrug,  "  such  an  inclination  is  not  at  all  to  be  encouraged. 
You  know  how  good  I  am  to  my  own  family,"  she  went  on, 
"  and  how  kindly  I  received  Charles  Huguenin,  although 
after  all  he  is  only  a  second  cousin,  and  I  had  not  seen 
his  father  for  years.  But  Charles  has  very  little  money. 
He  has  no  position.  It  is  not  a  position,  merely  to  have 
finished  his  studies  in  the  law  and  to  have  been  admitted 
to  the  bar  in  Paris.  If  he  were  to  marry  now,  he  would 
be  obliged,  in  order  to  support  a  wife,  to  go  home  to 
Provence,  to  his  father's,  and  make  wine  and  oil  and 
raise  silkworms.  And  frankly,  do  you  see  Reine  on  a 
farm  there  in  Provence,  superintending  workmen,  and 
no  more  theatre,  no  more  visits,  no  more  balls  ?  I 
know  —  I  know  —  she  always  says  she  is  not  fond  of 
society.  Mamma  also  said  this  during  the  lifetime  of 
my  poor  father ;  and  then,  when  we  were  ruined,  it  was  I 
who  had  to  cheer  her  up.  But  there  is  no  occasion  to 
discuss  the  matter.  Fortunately,  Charles  is  no  more 
thinking  of  Reine  than  Reine  is  of  him.  Let  us  return 
to  the  Faucherots.      What   answer   am  I  to   give   to 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  135 

Cruce  ?  I  must  tell  you  at  once  that  the  question  of 
dowry  is  settled.  I  have  concealed  nothing  from  our 
good  friend;  and  this  worthy  Mme.  Faucherot  —  who 
has  her  weak  points,  I  admit,  but  less  than  formerly ; 
she  is  improving  —  has  always  been  most  good-hearted. 
She  understands  perfectly.  One  cannot  do  everything 
in  life.  Her  husband  and  she  have  made  money;  we 
have  made  position.  It  is  not  your  fault,  mon  avii,  that 
we  have  nothing  to  give  to  Eeine.  It  is  the  fault  of 
your  profession.  I  knew  this  when  I  married  you;  but 
I  have  promised  myself  to  spare  our  child,  if  possible,  all 
these  troubles  that  we  have  had.  Very  well !  Here  we 
are  at  your  office.  Do  not  feel  in  a  hurry.  Take  all  the 
time  that  you  need.     I  will  wait  for  you." 

The  coupe  was  just  turning  the  corner  of  the  rue 
Druout  as  the  generous  Mathilde  granted  this  magnani- 
mous pardon  to  her  husband,  and  condescendingly  offered 
to  wait  for  him  half  an  hour  in  a  soft  and  well-warmed 
carriage.  Why  did  Hector,  descending  from  this  car- 
riage, and  ascending  in  his  patent-leather  shoes  the  con- 
taminated steps  of  the  staircase,  suddenly  have  a  vision 
of  Reine's  brown  eyes  and  the  sadness  of  their  gaze? 
What  relation  was  there  then  between  that  look  and  the 
words  which  her  mother  had  spoken  ?  Why,  also,  when 
the  good  Cartier  brought  him  his  slips,  did  the  journalist 
see  clearly,  instead  of  the  printed  pages  on  which  he 
mechanically  wrote  in  the  cabalistic  signs  of  corrections 
—  why  did  he  see  the  Provencal  landscape  which  he  had 


136  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

contemplated  but  once,  for  a  dozen  hours  in  tlie  month 
of  September,  passing  through  on  his  return  from  a 
press  congress  —  the  farm  of  the  Huguenins,  sheltered 
from  the  mistral  by  the  black  screen  of  its  cypress  trees, 
the  lines  of  vine  stocks  displaying  their  denticulated 
leaves  and  the  opulence  of  their  heavy  bunches  of  purple 
grapes  above  the  red  earth,  a  rose  garden  in  flower,  a 
silvery  olive  grove  near  by,  and  rocks  separating  this 
wood  from  the  blue  Mediterranean,  white  with  sails? 
How  did  this  vision  concern  the  writer  who,  with  a 
slender,  well-kept  hand,  where  sparkled  two  fine  gems, 
was  now  scribbling  the  few  lines  which  completed  his 
article  ?  This  hand  had  never  touched  any  rustic  imple- 
ment since  early  childhood.  And  still,  was  it  nostalgia 
of  the  soil  that  seized  the  renowned  journalist?  Was 
it  the  man  of  the  country  reappearing  in  the  Parisian, 
after  thirty  years  and  more  ?  Or,  indeed,  did  he  divine 
that  the  happiness  of  the  daughter,  who  resembled  him 
in  her  soul  as  she  did  in  her  eyes,  was  there  —  far,  far 
away  from  young  Faucherot's  millions,  far  from  Paris  — 
far  from  what  and  from  whom,  also?  But  already  the 
vision  had  vanished.  Hector  had  gathered  up  the  cor- 
rected slips  and  had  given  them  to  Cartier ;  he  had  but- 
toned his  overcoat,  and  touching  his  hat  coldly  and  with 
dignity,  as  befits  one  of  the  princes  of  criticism  toward 
mere  reporters  late  at  work,  he  left  the  editorial  room, 
and  he  did  not  overhear  the  remarks  which  the  petty 
journalists,  thus  saluted,  interchanged  concerning  their 
superior. 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  137 

"  That  is  another  of  our  fine  crush  hats,  old  Le  Prieux," 
one  observed. 

"  And  to  think  that  at  his  age  you  perhaps  will  be  just 
as  much  of  a  '  snob,' "  said  another ;  and  he  added,  laugh- 
ing, ''  and  just  as  infirm ! " 

"  The  fact  is,  he  is  a  perfect  cipher  !  His  last  chron- 
icle was  infantile.  How  has  he  made  his  way,  a  fellow 
like  that  ?  " 

"New  method  of  making  one's  way,  by  Hector  Le 
Prieux,  in  one  volume,  3  fr.  50,"  said  the  good  Cartier, 
jokingly ;  "  axiom :  first,  you  marry  a  very  pretty 
woman." 

"  What  do  you  mean  by  that  ?  "  asked  the  other. 

"I  mean  just  what  you  mean,"  rejoined  Cartier,  who 
had  just  pressed  a  button,  and  interrupted  his  chaffing  to 
say  to  the  boy  who  answered  the  bell,  "Notify  the  com- 
posing room  that  Le  Prieux  will  make  a  column  and 
three-quarters.  I  am  looking  over  the  proof.  You  shall 
have  it  in  ten  minutes  —  " 

And  the  man  under  obligations  to  Hector  "  the  snob," 
Hector  the  infirm,  Hector  the  husband  who  had  suc- 
ceeded because  of  his  pretty  wife,  carefully  filled  a 
meerschaum  pipe,  and  lighted  it,  with  his  sly  air  of  being 
an  excellent  fellow,  while  he  looked  over  the  slips  that 
Le  Prieux  had  already  corrected,  to  clear  them  from  any 
remaining  typographical  error.  This  was  his  way  of 
paying  his  debt  toward  his  benefactor.  The  secretary 
was  sincere  in  his  defamation,  and  no  less  sincere  in  the 


138  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

good-will  with,  which  he  rendered  this  service  to  the 
senior  journalist.  He  was  grateful  to  him,  and  he  en- 
vied him,  not  for  his  literary  position  but  for  his  car- 
riage by  the  month,  his  acquaintance  in  fashionable 
society,  and,  most  of  all,  for  being  the  husband  of  the 
"  beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux !  " 

IV 

THE    COST    OF    THE   SHOW 

On  the  morning  after  this  conversation  —  whose 
second  part  was  a  repetition  of  the  first,  with  this 
difference  only,  that  Hector's  objections  finally  gave 
way,  one  by  one  —  the  refined  and  beautiful  child  who 
had  been  unconsciously  its  subject,  Reine  Le  Prieux, 
rose  as  usual  before  eight  o'clock.  It  was  under- 
stood in  the  family  that  she  did  not  need  much  sleep. 
In  reality,  the  young  girl,  when  she  had  been  out 
the  evening  before,  and  waked  at  this  early  hour,  felt 
herself  very  tired,  very  much  exhausted.  But  she 
never  acknowledged  to  this  fatigue,  which  took  the 
colour  from  her  girlish  cheek,  made  dark  circles  around 
her  beautiful  brown  eyes,  and  sometimes  drove  into 
her  temple  a  stinging  point  of  headache;  for,  if  she 
had  not  allowed  this  fable  to  pass  for  truth,  how  could 
she  have  been  able,  herself,  to  superintend,  as  she  did 
every  morning,  the  little  details  of  her  father's  study  ? 
It  was  she  who  arranged,  with  delicate,  careful  hands, 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  139 

the  letter-paper  and  envelopes  in  their  pigeon-holes 
over  the  desk ;  she  who  changed  the  calendar  to  the 
day's  date ;  she  who  put  new  pens  into  the  pen- 
holders; she  who  took  care  that  the  writing-pad  had 
leaves  enough  for  the  day's  articles.  While  she  was 
busy  with  these  little  cares  an  inexpressible  emotion 
sometimes  saddened  her  face.  When  she  had  finished 
her  pious  task  she  would  often  look  long  at  a  portrait 
of  her  father,  banished  hither  by  Mme.  Le  Prieux, 
which  represented  Hector  at  a  very  early  age,  and 
quite  sufficiently  Bohemian  in  dress  to  justify  this 
exile  from  the  salon.  A  comrade  of  the  Latin  Quarter 
had  painted  him  in  a  red  jacket,  a  foulard  around  his 
neck,  his  hair  long,  in  the  act  of  writing,  with  the 
paper  on  his  knee.  This  studio  skit  had  the  merit 
common  to  work  done  with  verve  —  it  had  life  in 
it,  and  gave  a  true  idea  of  what  the  young  peasant 
of  the  Bourbonnais  had  been,  in  his  early  years  of 
ingenuous  fervour  and  enthusiasm,  with  light  upon 
his  brow  and  in  his  eyes.  How  pathetic  it  was  to 
Eeine  when  she  compared  this  remote  image  of  her 
father  with  that  father  himself,  as  he  would  look 
when  he  came  to  sit  down  in  that  arm-chair,  before 
that  table  which  she  had  prepared,  putting  on  his 
harness  for  a  labour  which  the  attentive  Antigone 
could  measure  materially  by  the  rapidity  with  which 
the  thickness  of  the  pad  diminished!  And  she  would 
go  to  the  bookcase  and  take  down  three  volumes,  more 


140  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

carefully  bound  than  the  others,  containing  the  two 
collections  of  poems  and  the  novel  by  Le  Prieux,  those 
OenUs  des  Brandes,  those  Rondes  Bourhonnaises,  and 
that  Rossigjieu,  which  the  gentle  child  was  now  the 
only  person  in  the  world  to  re-read  and  admire.  She 
was  not  a  literary  person,  Reine,  and  was  not  capable 
of  judging  these  feeble  poems  and  this  not  very  origi- 
nal novel.  She  turned  their  pages  with  the  ardent 
partiality  of  one  who  loves.  She  knew  nothing  in 
the  world  which  seemed  more  beautiful  to  her  —  more 
beautiful  and  more  pathetic.  For,  while  she  had  not 
the  critical  sense  to  discern  the  insufficiency  of  these 
first  attempts,  her  heart  made  her  feel,  with  the  most 
painful  clearness,  what  mutilations  their  author  must 
have  practised  upon  his  own  soul  in  order  to  become 
the  literary  job-hand  that  he  now  was.  By  what 
miracle  of  affection  had  this  quiet  creature,  so  naive, 
so  inexperienced,  divined  the  secret  life-drama  of  the 
unsuccessful  artist,  which  he  had  never  even  related  to 
himself  ?  Emotional  resemblances  between  a  father 
and  a  daughter  produce  phenomena  of  moral  second 
sight.  The  father  feels  in  advance  the  sufferings  that 
merely  threaten  the  daughter.  The  daughter  pities 
her  father  for  the  griefs  that  he  undergoes  without 
being  willing  to  admit  them ;  and,  for  this  reason,  it 
was  that  during  her  morning  visits  to  this  laboratory 
for  copy,  Reine  turned  her  eyes  away  from  another 
portrait,    that    of    her    mother,    placed    on    the    desk, 


OTHEK   people's   LUXURY  141 

representing  her  as  indeed  the  "  beautiful  Mme.  Le 
Prieux,"  in  the  dress  of  a  princess  of  the  Renaissance 
which  she  had  worn  with  brilliant  success,  at  a  cos- 
tume party.  The  great  photograph,  in  its  frame  of 
chiselled  silver,  dominated  the  paper,  pens,  ink,  blotter, 
all  the  humble  implements  of  the  patient  labour  which 
had  paid  for  that  toilette,  and  for  how  many  others  I 
Did  the  young  girl  already  judge  her  mother,  that  she 
seemed  to  have  a  horror  of  this  portrait,  or  did  she 
fear  that  she  might  do  this,  and,  like  her  father  in 
this  respect  also,  did  she  refuse  to  acknowledge  to 
herself  certain  impressions,  obscure  and  too  painful, 
which  lived  and  throbbed,  nevertheless,  in  the  depths 
of  her  soul  ? 

This  sympathy,  whose  hidden  bond  thus  united  Hector 
Le  Prieux  to  his  daughter,  must  have  been  very  strong, 
for,  as  she  had  guessed  his  secret,  he  found  that,  almost 
without  a  clew,  he  had  become  aware  of  hers.  If  he  had 
been  able  on  that  January  morning  to  follow  her  in  the 
coming  and  going  of  her  thoughts,  he  would  have  ascer- 
tained that  in  mentioning  the  name  of  Charles  Hugue- 
nin,  the  night  before,  he  had  not  been  mistaken  as  to 
Heine's  preference.  But  he  believed  that  she  merely 
had  a  preference  for  her  cousin,  as  he  had  said ;  while, 
in  fact,  she  loved  him.  This  love  owed  its  existence,  as 
happens  often  when  one  is  twenty  years  old,  to  a  reac- 
tion. We  almost  always  begin  by  loving  some  one 
against  some  other  person  or  against  something.     This 


142  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

pity  that  Keine  Le  Prieux  felt  for  her  father  translated 
itself  into  an  instinctive,  irresistible,  and  almost  animal 
aversion  toward  the  environment  of  which  her  father  was 
the  victim.  Too  delicate  and  too  scrupulous  to  hold  her 
mother  responsible  for  what  she  regarded  as  a  misfortune 
of  destiny,  she  laid  the  blame  on  everything  which  this 
mother  loved,  and  she  herself  at  once  detested.  Not  dar- 
ing to  condemn  her  in  her  person,  she  condemned  her  in 
her  tastes.  She  hated,  accordingly,  with  this  unreasoning 
hatred,  all  this  stage-setting,  whose  cost  she  knew  too 
well,  —  Paris,  and  society,  and  dinner-parties,  and  balls, 
and  receptions,  and  first  performances,  and  toilettes,  and 
luxury.  The  vision  of  the  Provengal  farm  which,  the 
night  before,  had  so  strangely  crossed  the  imagination  of 
the  journalist  as  he  corrected  his  slips,  had  never  left  her 
since  the  September  day  when  that  nook  of  southern 
country  had  been  visible  to  her  also.  She  saw  herself,  in 
thought,  dwelling  in  that  quiet  house,  living  a  simple 
life  there,  with  some  one  who  would  love  her  in  a  simple 
way,  and  this  cousin  Charles,  this  shy  young  fellow, 
three-quarters  Provencal,  had  found  the  road  to  her 
heart  by  his  very  awkwardness.  She  had  taken  pleasure, 
in  the  innocent  privacy  of  their  cousinship,  in  striving 
against  a  certain  ambition  in  him  for  a  more  brilliant 
existence,  which  was  urging  him,  a  very  remarkable 
student  as  a  lad,  and  now  a  prize-winner  in  the  Law 
School,  to  make  his  career  at  the  Paris  bar.  And,  out 
of  endless  conversations  and  much  giving  and  accepting 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  143 

of  advice,  tlie  two  cousins  had  reached  at  last,  each  for  the 
other,  that  stage  of  feeling  which  has  need  neither  of 
declarations  nor  of  promises  to  communicate  and  affirm 
itself,  a  feeling  —  penetrated  with  enthusiastic  respect  on 
the  young  man's  part,  and  with  confiding  modesty  on  the 
part  of  the  girl  —  which  had  invaded  their  souls  till  it 
enveloped  them  like  an  atmosphere,  without  any  words 
too  definite,  any  glance  too  ardent,  any  too  lingering 
pressure  of  the  hand.  And  when  the  moment  had  come 
for  the  definite  avowal,  it  had  seemed  to  them,  so 
sure  had  they  both  been  of  each  other's  hearts,  that 
they  had  long  before  confessed  that  they  loved  each 
other. 

This  inevitable  avowal,  which  was  destined  to  over- 
throw the  skilful  plots  of  those  two  Macchiavellis  in 
petticoats,  —  Mme.  Le  Prieux  and  Mme.  Faucherot,  —  and 
of  that  third  Macchiavelli  in  evening  coat,  the  subtle 
Cruce,  had  been  exchanged  only  the  preceding  week. 
The  thing  had  happened  under  those  conditions  of  half 
badinage  which  were  due  to  the  friendly,  almost  frater- 
nal familiarity  of  the  relations  between  the  two  cousins. 
It  was  at  a  grand  ball  given  by  the  president  of  a  bank, 
an  invitation  to  which  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  obtained  for 
the  young  man,  who,  of  late,  had  been  much  less  shy 
than  formerly.  The  mother,  blinded,  as  parents  often 
are,  by  her  preconceived  ideas  as  to  the  character  of  her 
daughter,  had  expressed  to  the  latter  that  very  evening 
her  gratification  at  the  change.     And  Eeine,  taking  her 


144  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

cousin's  arm  to  go  to  the  buffet  after  a  quadrille,  had 
reported  to  him  the  maternal  commendation. 

"Then  you  think,"  Charles  had  asked  at  once,  "that  I 
am  no  longer  disagreeable  to  her  ?  " 

"You  have  never  been  that,"  Reine  rejoined  eagerly; 
"  but  now  you  are  a  great  favourite.  I  shall  have  to  ask 
you  to  speak  for  me,  when  I  have  any  difficulty  with 
mamma ! " 

"I  will,  cousin,"  the  young  man  replied,  smiling  and 
growing  red,  as  he  spoke.  "  And  perhaps,"  he  continued, 
"  now  would  be  the  time  for  me  to  write  to  my  mother, 
and  ask  her  —  what  I  have  so  much  desired  to  ask ;  and 
still,  I  scarcely  dare." 

"  What,  then  ?  "  Reine  had  asked,  she  also  with  a  smile 
on  her  parted  lips  and  a  thrill  at  her  heart.  She  had  with- 
drawn her  arm,  and  stood  still  for  a  minute  as  if  to  fan 
herself.  Although  it  was  scarcely  the  place,  this  corner 
of  a  ballroom,  in  front  of  a  loaded  buffet,  to  speak  certain 
solemn  words,  the  young  girl  expected  to  hear  them 
spoken.  Had  they  been  alone  anywhere,  her  modesty 
would  not  have  allowed  her  to  hear  them,  and  Charles 
would  not  have  ventured  to  speak  them ;  but  here,  with 
the  excitement  of  the  soft  rhythm  of  the  music,  so  shel- 
tered and  yet  so  isolated  amid  these  couples  —  light 
gowns  and  black  coats  —  gliding  past,  returning,  revolv- 
ing, within  a  few  steps  from  them,  he  was  not  afraid  to 
say,  — 

"I  shall  not  do  it,  unless  you  are  willing,  cousin.     I 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  145 

should  like,  then,  to  ask  my  mother  to  write  to  yours,  to 
know  if  she  may  come  to  Paris  to  make  a  certain  pro- 
posal. In  a  word,  cousin,  if  I  begged  you  to  change 
your  name,  and  become  Mme.  Charles  Huguenin,  what 
should  you  say  ?  " 

While  Charles  was  speaking,  Eeine  could  see  that  he 
also  was  agitated.  An  extraordinary  emotion  had  seized 
her,  and  with  a  tremor  in  her  voice  she  had  replied,  — 

"  If  my  father  and  mother  say  yes,  so  will  I.  Please 
say  no  more,"  she  had  added,  and  he  had  simply 
answered  in  a  half-suppressed  voice, — 

"I  will  write  to-morrow.  In  four  days  your  mother 
will  have  the  letter.  How  long  four  days  will  seem 
to  me!  And  yet,  cousin,  I  have  loved  you  for  two 
years." 

As  some  one  at  this  moment  drew  near,  who  chanced 
to  be  no  other  than  M.  Cruce  himself,  Eeine  had 
been  excused  from  replying  to  this  too  tender  sentence. 
How  grateful  she  had  been  to  her  cousin  for  at  once 
disappearing !  He  had  appreciated  her  agitation  at 
hearing  words  to  which  no  scrupulous  child  could  listen 
without  the  feeling  that  she  ought  to  let  her  mother  know 
at  once  what  had  been  said  to  her.  And  how  grateful,  also, 
that  during  the  four  days  he  had  never  once  appeared  in 
the  rue  du  General-Foy !  Although  she  feared  objections 
on  her  mother's  part,  the  young  girl  never  doubted  that 
her  parents  would  leave  her  free  to  follow  the  dictates  of 
her  heart,  in  her  reply  to  the  proposal  made  by  the 


146  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

parents  of  Charles,  and  neither  did  she  doubt  that  they 
would  make  this  proposal,  which  would  mark  for  her  the 
beginning  of  a  new  life.  This  little  fever  of  love  and 
hope  which  had  stirred  her  since  the  conversation  at  the 
ball  did  not  fail  of  having,  as  may  be  supposed,  contra- 
dictory impressions.  And  it  was  these  impressions 
which,  on  that  January  morning,  rendered  Eeine  so 
nervous  before  her  father's  portrait,  while  she  was 
completing  her  usual  arrangement  of  his  table.  She 
felt  too  strongly  that  when  once  she  was  gone,  the 
solitude  of  the  journalist  would  be  entire ;  and,  as  it  was 
now  the  sixth  day  since  the  ball,  and  Mme.  Huguenin's 
letter  to  Mme.  Le  Prieux  must  have  arrived,  she  reflected 
on  the  future :  — 

"  Poor  dear  Pde,"  she  said  to  herself,  employing  in  her 
thoughts  the  little  patois  abbreviation  he  had  taught  her, 
"  it  is  too  bad  I  should  want  to  leave  him !  Who  will 
arrange  his  papers  for  him  as  he  likes  them,  when  I  am 
not  here  any  more  ?  Mamma  could  not.  And  then  she 
does  not  rise  early  enough  in  the  morning.  Who  will  talk 
with  him  about  his  plans  ?  Who  will  encourage  him 
to  write  —  at  least  his  book  on  Bourbonnais  poetry  ? " 
This  was,  in  fact,  one  of  the  plans  cherished  by  Le 
Prieux.  This  humble  ambition  was  his  last  artist-dream. 
No  longer  hoping  to  find  leisure  for  a  work  of  imagination, 
or  to  recover  that  elasticity  of  the  whole  being  which  is 
necessary  for  poems  or  novels,  he  had  undertaken  a  labour 
of  special  erudition,  which  satisfied  at  once  his  need  for 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  147 

some  non-mercenary  work  and  his  early  and  still  enduring 
taste  for  the  literature  of  his  native  soil.  He  had  proposed 
to  himself  to  write  a  study  of  the  poets  of  his  province, 
—  Jean  Dupin,  Pierre  and  Jeannette  de  Nesson,  Henri 
Baude,  Jean  Robertet,  Blaise  de  Vigenere,  Etienne  Bour- 
nier,  Claude  Billard,  Jean  de  Lingendes.  These  names 
and  others  still,  unknown  even  to  the  most  prying  bib- 
liophiles, were  familiar  to  him  and,  through  him,  to 
the  young  girl  who  had  copied  with  her  own  hand  all 
the  extracts  from  these  authors  destined  to  appear  in  the 
volume. 

She  went  on  with  her  monologue :  "  But  no !  He  shall 
finish  his  book  at  our  house.  He  will  come  to  stay  with 
us  in  the  summer  when  there  are  no  new  plays  to  be 
criticised,  instead  of  going  to  Trouville,  where  it  is  so 
expensive.  I  will  give  him  a  room  looking  out  upon  the 
pines,  and  perhaps  he  will  find  inspiration  again:  who 
knows  ! "  And  in  thought  she  beheld  him  seated  by  the 
open  window,  the  wind  in  the  pine  forest  filling  all  the 
air,  mingled  with  the  far-off  sound  of  the  waves  upon 
the  beach  and  the  shrill  cry  of  the  grasshoppers.  Eeine 
saw  her  father's  hand  upon  the  table  and  his  pen  scrib- 
bling incomplete  lines,  which  were  verses !  Then 
another  image  presented  itself :  "  And  mamma  ?  "  she 
queried,  "how  will  she  endure  this  banishment  to  the 
country  ?  Oh,  we  can  take  her  out  among  the  neigh- 
bours. We  will  plan  some  parties  for  her.  Charles  is  so 
kind !    He  has  so  many  ideas !     He  will  find  some  way 


148  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

to  amuse  her.  Besides,  if  Pee  writes  this  volume;  it  will 
be  the  Academy ! " 

This  desire  that,  at  the  end  of  his  long  career,  the 
journalist  should  wear  the  coat  with  the  green  palms  and 
deliver,  beneath  the  dome,  the  official  address  in  presence 
of  the  usual  audience  on  these  occasions,  was  the  one 
sentiment  in  common  held  by  Mme.  Le  Prieux  and  her 
daughter;  and  the  latter  found,  in  this  union  of  their 
wishes  on  one  point,  a  secret  solace  for  the  remorse  she 
felt  every  time  she  was  constrained  to  recognize  her 
mother's  egotism:  "Mon  Dieu!"  she  said  to  herself,  "it 
has  so  often  been  said  to  us:  'If  M.  Le  Prieux  would 
only  write  a  book,  he  would  be  chosen  at  once.'  Charles 
and  I  will  make  him  do  it  now,  when  he  comes  to  stay 
with  us.     And  we  will  have  poor  dear  Panny,  too  — " 

"Poor  dear  Fanny  "  was  an  elderly  demoiselle,  Perrin 
by  name,  who  had  given  Eeine  her  earliest  lessons  on 
the  piano,  and  remained  attached  to  the  family  as  a 
species  of  "  companion."  For  a  small  salary,  she  came 
in  from  remote  Batignolles  where  she  lived,  sometimes  to 
take  the  young  girl  out  for  a  walk,  sometimes  to  share 
Keine's  solitary  meal  and  evening  when  her  parents  had 
gone  out  to  dinner  or  to  the  theatre.  This  modest,  good 
creature  was  E-eine's  only  real  friend,  notwithstanding 
her  mother's  astute  endeavours  to  impose  upon  her  the 
elegant  comradeships  of  aristocratic  lectures,  "select" 
catechism  classes,  and  well-supported  charitable  works. 
Eeine  included  all  these  distinguished  intimacies  in  her 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  149 

insurmountable  antipathy  to  the  life  of  luxury  and  chic. 
And  the  idea  of  an  escape  from  these  burdens  of  false 
friendship  was  another  of  the  reasons  that  rendered  so 
attractive  to  her  the  dream  of  life  in  the  remote  Pro- 
venqal  vias,  surrounded  by  those  who  truly  loved  her. 
Among  this  number,  she  included  poor  Fanny,  that 
aged  child  of  the  Parisian  suburbs,  and  fancied  her 
happy,  with  a  rather  comic  and  entirely  out-of-placo 
happiness,  in  these  surroundings  of  Southern  rural  life. 
Eeine  was  smiling  at  her  own  thoughts,  as  Perrette  in 
the  fable  smiled  at  her  hopes  from  the  milk-pail,  and 
was  so  completely  magnetized  by  her  vision  of  the  future 
that  she  did  not  hear  the  entrance  of  her  father,  who 
waited  at  the  door  a  moment  to  observe  her,  as  she  stood 
dreamy  and  motionless,  before  he  spoke  to  her. 

And  in  truth  she  was  an  adorable  picture  of  grace  and 
youth,  in  that  little  literary  workroom,  its  walls  adorned 
with  books,  and  its  one  window,  which  looked  into  an 
inner  courtyard,  supplying  it  on  this  cold  January 
morning  with  only  a  yellowish,  foggy,  and,  so  to  speak, 
impoverished  light.  Already  dressed  for  the  day,  and 
her  chestnut  hair  in  its  usual  simple  arrangement,  with 
gloves  protecting  her  hands  and  an  epauletted  apron  of 
gi-ay  silk  protecting  her  dress,  she  looked  the  most  ex- 
quisite household  fairy  that  ever  gave  poetic  charm  to 
the  little  duties  of  domestic  life.  In  thus  surprising  her, 
so  pretty,  so  dainty,  just  now  busy  with  such  humble 
little  cares  with  so  much  quiet  application,  how  could  the 


150  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

father  fail  to  think  of  his  recent  conversation  with  his 
wife,  in  which  all  the  future  of  this  exquisite  creature 
had  been  at  stake  ?  And  how  could  he  fail  to  experience 
anew  the  shock  which  he  had  received  when  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  had  spoken  the  name  of  Edgard  Faucherot  ? 
Was  that  fellow  the  husband  to  whom  this  girl  ought  to 
be  given  ?  A  temptation  seized  him  to  question  her, 
there,  at  once,  and  to  make  her  say  "  no,"  that  the  affair 
might  be  immediately  abandoned.  And  then  he  remem- 
bered his  promise,  renewed  that  same  morning  at  his 
wife's  bedside,  whither  he  had  gone  to  take  his  first 
breakfast  —  a  sign  of  grave  deliberation.  He  had  there 
formally  agreed  not  to  put  this  question  to  Reine.  He 
kept  his  word,  in  fact,  though  with  a  little  stretching  of 
the  conscience,  very  unusual  with  him,  as  a  rule  scrupu- 
lous in  his  fidelity.  The  young  girl  at  last  saw  him, 
and  came  forward  to  receive  his  kiss. 

"  Well !  little  moigne,"  he  said,  also  using,  as  he  spoke 
to  her,  one  of  the  pretty  little  words  of  his  province. 
Moineau  (sparrow)  became  moiniau,  and  from  this  came 
moigne,  which  is  the  affectionate  word  of  the  peasants 
for  their  baby  girls.  "Were  you  gone  to  the  moon? 
Of  what  or  of  whom  were  you  thinking?" 

"  Of  nobody  and  of  nothing,  in  particular,"  Reine  said, 
colouring  slightly,  and  she  continued  quickly :  "  How  are 
you  this  morning?  You  were  not  kept  very  late  at 
the  office  last  night.  Were  you  satisfied  with  your 
article  ?  " 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  161 

"Fairly,"  the  father  said,  "except  that  there  was  a 
bad  typographical  error.     Cartier  is  getting  spoiled." 

"  Ah ! "  Reine  interrupted  eagerly,  "  if  I  could  go  to 
the  office  and  read  the  slips ! " 

"  That's  all  I  need,"  Hector  replied  gayly ;  "  but  I 
am  wasting  time.  It  is  a  busy  day  with  me,"  and, 
holding  up  the  handful  of  newspapers  that  he  had 
brought  with  him,  he  added :  "  I  ran  over  these,  as  I  was 
dressing.  Not  a  subject  in  any  one  of  them,  and  it  is 
the  day  for  my  Clavaroche.  Then,  observing  a  pile  of  the 
morning's  letters  on  the  table :  "  Happily,  some  of  these 
good  correspondents  of  mine  will  help  me  out!  And 
you,  Mademoiselle  Moigne,  are  expected  by  mamma. 
She  has  something  of  importance  to  say  to  you.  Do 
not  tell  her  that  I  told  you.  But  try,  in  answering 
her,  to  be  sure  that  you  know  what  you  wish.  Don't 
ask  me  anything.  Only  be  sure  that  you  remember 
Goethe's  fine  sentence:  We  are  free  at  our  first  step; 
we  are  not  free  at  the  second.  We  say  that  more  simply 
at  Chevagnes :  Qui  ne  se  m&le  ne  se  demMe.  Kiss  me,  my 
dear,  dear  child." 

Although  Reine,  quiet  and  gentle,  accustomed  to  live 
much  within  herself  and  to  take  life  rather  seriously, 
had  not  that  light-heartedness  natural  to  her  age,  —  the 
period  of  gay  hope,  —  how  could  she  fail,  as  she  kissed 
her  father  with  infinite  gratitude,  of  interpreting  as  a 
glad  promise  this  transparent  allusion  to  a  marriage  pro- 
posal?     Without  doubt  Mme.   Huguenin's   letter  had 


152  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

arrived.  Her  parents  had  deliberated  upon  it,  and 
would  leave  her  free  to  dictate  the  answer.  Once 
more,  for  a  minute,  in  her  imagination,  she  heard  the 
sound  of  the  wind  in  the  pines,  and  the  shrill  chirp  of 
the  grasshoppers;  once  more  she  saw  the  little  mas,  in 
its  atmosphere  of  much-desired  peace ;  and,  flinging  her- 
self into  her  father's  arms,  she  whispered,  "How  good 
you  are  to  me,  and  how  I  love  you  ! " 

"Can  it  be  true,  as  her  mother  thinks,  that  she  is 
favourably  disposed  toward  this  Taucherot  marriage  ? " 
Hector  asked  himself,  as  he  sat  down  at  his  table  and 
began  counting  the  leaves  destined  for  his  Clavaroche. 
"She  understood  perfectly  well  that  her  marriage  was 
Tinder  consideration,  and  she  is  too  acute  not  to  have 
guessed  the  person  —  unless  —  "  And  the  good  man 
rested  his  head  upon  his  hands,  in  an  attitude  of  pro- 
found meditation.  For  the  first  time  in  many  years  he 
sat  there,  his  paper  ready  before  him,  without  a  thought 
about  his  task.  Yet  he  dared  not  translate  his  "  unless  " 
into  its  true  significance,  nor  again  put  into  words  the 
idea  uttered  by  him  the  night  before,  and  rejected  by  her 
with  such  scornful  irony.  The  sway  of  strong  characters 
over  weaker  ones  is  exercised  in  the  domain  of  thought 
before  being  exercised  in  the  domain  of  will.  The 
energy  with  which  Mathilde  had  protested  against  the 
supposition  of  any  affection  on  the  part  of  Eeine 
for  Charles  Huguenin  still  influenced  Le  Prieux,  and, 
doubting    his    own    intuition,  he    sighed    heavily,  un- 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  153 

covered  his  inkstand,  and  began  to  write,  saying  to 
himself,  — 

"  Nobody  but  a  mother  can  understand  her  daughter. 
I  must  wait  till  they  have  talked  together." 

While  the  paper  creaked  under  his  pen,  at  last 
started,  the  two  women  indeed  were  talking,  a  few  steps 
away,  in  the  bedroom  of  Mme,  Le  Prieux,  separated  from 
the  narrow  workroom  by  the  yet  narrower  bedroom  of  the 
literary  craftsman.  Certain  it  is,  that  this  indefatigable 
pen  would  have  dropped  from  his  hand  in  his  amaze- 
ment if,  the  frail  partitions  suddenly  falling  down,  he 
had  surprised  in  its  cruel  reality  the  conversation 
between  mother  and  daughter.  The  latter,  for  the  first 
time  in  years,  since  the  moment  when  her  pity  for  her 
father's  servitude  had  begun  to  awaken,  had  entered 
Mme.  Le  Prieux's  room  confidingly,  with  open  heart,  her 
filial  affection  shining  in  her  eyes,  ready  to  show  itself 
in  grateful  and  happy  tears,  the  confession  of  her  ingen- 
uous love  almost  on  her  lips.  And  immediately  this  first 
impulse  had  been,  not  destroyed,  but,  as  it  were,  arrested, 
merely  in  meeting  the  look  of  the  domestic  despot,  upon 
whom  her  heart's  future  depended.  At  the  moment 
when  the  young  girl  entered  the  room,  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
was  in  her  bed,  having  lain  down  again  —  as  she  did  every 
day,  not  to  rise  till  late  in  the  morning  —  after  her  bath, 
which  she  took  with  conditions  of  temperature  and  dura- 
tion prescribed  by  her  physician.  The  practical  charac- 
ter of  the  Southern  people,  so  positive  in  all  that  they 


154  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

wish  or  comprehend,  caused  her  to  observe  with  extreme 
strictness  the  slightest  precautions  of  the  regime  which 
was  to  preserve  her  health  and,  with  it,  her  beauty. 
Many  details  in  the  room  attested,  besides,  that  the  cult 
of  Mme.  Le  Prieux  for  this  beauty  never  relaxed,  even 
outside  of  her  hours  of  exhibition,  or  rather  that  she 
was  always  on  exhibition,  even  when  the  spectators  were 
only  her  husband,  her  daughter,  and  her  maid.  Accord- 
ingly she  had,  for  this  hour  passed  in  reposing  after  her 
bath,  a  complete  set  of  fine  morning  jackets  —  of  foulard, 
of  surah,  of  crgpe  de  chine,  of  batiste,  according  to  the 
season.  This  morning  she  was  wearing  one  of  old  rose 
bengaline.  A  lace  scarf  was  drawn  over  her  hair  which 
she  kept  loosely  braided  by  night,  and  artificial  waves 
framed  her  forehead.  These  she  used,  until  she  dressed 
for  the  evening,  to  save  her  own  hair  from  being  waved 
twice.  The  general  colour  scheme  of  her  room  —  its  walls 
hung  with  yellow  silk,  in  stripes  alternately  dull  and 
lustrous,  the  dark  mahogany  of  its  furniture  in  the  style 
of  the  Empire,  and  its  delicate  green  carpet  —  had  been 
skilfully  combined  to  harmonize  with  her  colourless  bru- 
nette complexion. 

She  had  before  her,  placed  upon  an  eider-down  quilt 
of  yellow  silk,  which  matched  the  shade  of  the  walls,  a 
broad  movable  table  with  short  legs,  on  which  lay  the 
blotter  destined  for  her  correspondence,  and  beside  it  the 
box  containing   all  the   little  implements  of  manicure. 

She  was  occupied,  when  Eeine    approached   to  say 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  155 

good  morning,  in  rubbing  with  the  polisher  her  nails, 
lustrous  as  enamel.  A  slight  and  refreshing  fragrance 
of  amber  and  verbena  had  already  been  vapourized  in 
the  room,  which  was  almost  cold,  notwithstanding  the 
supple  flame  on  the  hearth,  the  windows,  upon  which 
was  designed  a  fantastic  foliage  of  frost,  having  been 
hygienically  open  for  more  than  a  half  hour.  Thus 
surprised  at  this  work,  and  with  this  toilette,  in  these 
surroundings  and  this  perfumed  air,  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
would  have  given  an  impression  of  incurable  childish- 
ness, had  not  her  face,  white  with  powder,  been  rendered 
tragic  by  the  traces  of  age  imprinted,  notwithstanding 
all,  upon  her  eyelids,  around  her  temples,  in  the  lines  of 
the  mouth  and  the  creases  of  the  neck.  Everything, 
even  to  the  intentional  contrast  between  the  wall 
colouring  of  the  room  and  her  own  pallor,  brought  out 
the  singular  hardness  of  her  features,  still  beautiful,  but 
with  an  almost  sinister  beauty,  augmented  still  further 
by  the  black  splendour  of  her  eyes.  She  fixed  them  at 
once  upon  Reine's,  while  her  mouth,  so  imperious  in 
repose,  opened  to  say  —  the  first  inquiries  as  to  the  sleep 
and  the  health  of  each  being  exchanged  — 

"My  dear  child,  I  want  you  to  give  me  your  whole 
attention,  I  want  to  have  an  interview  of  extreme 
importance  with  you." 

"  Mamma,  I  am  listening,  I  am  ready,"  Eeine  replied. 
Although  her  ardent  hope  of  the  moment  previous  was 
already  changed,  at  the  mere  sound  of  this  voice,  into 


156  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

a  fear  that  her  mother  would  make  very  serious  objec- 
tions to  her  marriage  with  their  cousin,  she  had  no 
doubt  that  it  was  this  marriage  about  which  her 
mother  was  going  to  speak ;  and  the  thought  that  she 
would  have  to  strive  for  her  love  brought  a  little  flash 
of  pride  to  her  beautiful  face,  as  she  said,  "Father  has 
told  me  —  " 

"  Ah !  your  father  has  anticipated  me  ?  "  said  Mme.  Le 
Prieux.  "He  had  promised,  however,  that  he  would 
let  me  speak  to  you  first  —  " 

"He  told  me  only  that  you  desired  to  see  me,"  the 
girl  interrupted,  colouring  slightly,  because  of  this 
half  falsehood,  which,  also,  only  half  deceived  the 
mother.  Again  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  —  to  read  the 
depths  of  her  child's  heart  —  the  same  sharp  look 
with  which  she  had  questioned  her  husband  in  the 
coupe,  when  she  had  asked  him,  "  Do  you  know 
what  Eeine  thinks  ?  "  She  had  there,  hidden  in  her 
blotter,  Mme.  Huguenin's  letter,  received  the  evening 
before,  with  its  request  —  almost  in  due  form  — 
for  the  hand  of  Eeine  for  her  son.  This  letter 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  considered  it  her  duty  not  to  mention 
at  all  to  Eeine;  and  it  was  her  intention  not  to  speak 
of  it  to  her  husband  till  later,  when  the  Faucherot 
marriage  had  been  announced.  She  justified  herself 
for  this  double  silence  by  the  absence  of  the  final 
formalities  in  the  step  taken  by  Charles's  mother. 
She  justified  herself  for  it  especially  by  the  conviction 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  157 

that  she  was  working  for  Eeine's  happiness.  After 
all,  was  she  to  blame  for  conceiving  of  th^s  happiness 
in  accordance  with  her  own  nature  ?  Was  she  to  blame 
considering  her  husband  as  a  visionary,  a  person  of 
weak  character  whom  she  had  been  obliged  to  protect, 
for  not  consulting  him  in  a  decision  whose  true  motives 
could  not  be,  and  must  not  be,  made  known  to  him  ? 
She  was  about  to  tell  them  to  her  daughter,  these 
true  motives,  and  that  amount  of  frankness  justified, 
in  her  eyes,  the  silence  she  preserved  upon  another 
point. 

"  My  child,"  she  began,  after  having  observed  that 
Eeine's  brown  eyes  remained,  as  usual,  impenetrable 
under  hers,  "  I  must  go  back  a  long  way.  You  will 
soon  understand  why."  Then  after  a  silence  :  "  When 
I  married  your  father,  you  know  that  we  were  not 
rich,  and  you  also  know  why.  We  should  have  been 
rich,  if  your  grandfather  had  done  as  so  many  financiers 
are  doing  at  the  present  time  —  who  have  a  few  more 
millions  after  each  failure.  He  was  a  great  and  honest 
man,  as  you  know;  and  thanks  to  him  and  to  your 
grandmother,  we  can  look  every  one  in  the  face. 
We  wronged  no  man  out  of  a  centime,  in  our  disaster. 
Your  father  and  I  began  our  married  life  with  just 
enough  not  to  die  of  hunger.  Yes,  that  is  the  point 
from  which  we  started,  to  gain  the  position  in  society 
which  is  ours  to-day  —  ours,  and,  consequently,  yours. 
Ah!   I  can  do  myself  the  justice  to  say  that  I  have 


158  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

laboured  for  years  at  nothing  else,  and,  as  for  your 
father,  he  has  spared  no  effort  to  assist  me.  It  was 
not  an  easy  thing.  Society  is  prejudiced  against  liter- 
ary men,  especially  against  journalists.  And  I  admit 
these  prejudices  are  often  well  founded.  Your  father 
was  faultless.  He  never  wrote  a  single  article  with- 
out remembering  that  he  was  a  man  of  the  world.  I 
must  add  that  this  has  been  appreciated.  And  I  tell 
you  this  that  you  may  always  be  grateful  to  that 
poor  man  who  has  laboured  so  hard." 

Unconsciously  arrogant,  Mme.  Le  Prieux  accom- 
panied with  another  brief  silence  and  a  sigh  this 
eulogium  which  she  decreed  to  the  conjugal  day- 
labourer  whom  she  had  exploited,  whom  she  continued 
still  so  implacably  to  exploit.  Reine  had  felt,  as  she 
listened  to  this  exordixim,  that  sensation  of  cold  at 
her  heart  which  she  knew  only  too  well  from  having 
endured  it  whenever  she  encountered  certain  senti- 
ments of  her  mother's.  This  vague  uneasiness  was 
still  further  increased  by  the  solemnity  with  which 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  seemed  to  invest  this  preparatory 
address.  For  what  purpose  this  evoking  of  the  memo- 
ries of  her  own  life  ?  Eeine  would  not,  however,  leave 
without  response  this  appeal  to  her  filial  gratitude, 
and  she  said, — 

"I  know  how  much  father  works,  and  how  much 
I  owe  to  him.  I  assure  you  that  I  am  not  ungrate- 
ful.    I  even  feel  that  he  works  too  much  — " 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  159 

She  had  not  measured  the  scope  of  these  words,  which 
had  escaped  her  so  involuntarily  that  she  was  discon- 
certed by  them  herself.  She  was  still  more  confused 
on  seeing  her  mother  take  them  as  a  text  for  a  new 
and  very  serious  confidence. 

*'I  perceive  with  great  joy  that  you  so  fully  under- 
stand me,  my  sweet  Reine,"  the  mother  had  replied. 
"  You  feel  the  same  anxiety  about  this  poor  man  that  I 
do.  It  is  true.  He  works  too  hard  for  his  age.  He 
fatigues  himself.  He  would  work  harder  yet  if  he 
knew  what  you  are  about  to  know.  But  you  must 
swear  to  me,  understand  me  perfectly,  you  must  swear 
that  this  secret  shall  die  with  us." 

"  I  promise  you,  mamma,"  Reine  said,  and  added  not 
another  word.  But  if  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  again  bent 
her  scrutinizing  gaze  upon  her  daughter,  she  would 
have  noticed  that  the  girl  trembled.  Why  all  these 
preambles  before  the  question  that  she  expected,  that 
seemed  to  her  so  simple  to  ask:  "Your  cousin  Charles 
wishes  to  marry  you.  What  answer  shall  we  give 
him  ?  "     And  instead  came  these  words  :  — 

"  The  secret,  my  daughter,  which  is  entirely  unknown 
to  your  father,  is  this  —  that,  notwithstanding  his  exces- 
sive labour,  and  prodigies  of  economy  on  my  part,  we 
have  not  been  able  to  secure  that  social  position  of 
which  I  just  now  spoke,  without  our  expenses  during 
the  last  ten  years  —  and  each  year  more  and  more  — 
exceeding  our  income.      You  know  our  home  life,  how- 


160  OTHER   people's  LUXURY 

ever;  you  see,  yourself,  that  we  economize  at  every 
point  in  respect  to  the  table,  when  we  are  alone,  and 
in  our  dress.  You  know  the  care  I  have  always  taken 
to  avoid  any  marked  styles,  so  that  we  can  make  our 
clothes  last.  You  know  how  often  they  are  made  over 
or  repaired,  in  the  house.  We  go  to  the  great  makers 
only  when  it  is  necessary  that  we  should.  We  have  a 
cheap  milliner,  a  cheap  jeweller.  We  keep  no  horses. 
When  we  travel,  your  father  always  applies  for  a  pass, 
and  we  avail  ourselves  of  his  connection  with  the  press 
to  obtain  the  lowest  rates  at  hotels.  In  respect  to  all 
this  I  make  no  complaint,  although  I  was  brought  up  in 
ignorance  of  these  annoyances.  What  is  cruel  for  me  is 
this,  that  with  all  the  trouble  I  have  taken  —  for  him, 
that  he  might  have  the  social  position  which  he  has, 
notwithstanding  his  profession,  and  for  you,  that  you 
might  have,  as  a  young  girl,  the  acquaintances  that 
you  ought  to  have  —  I  have  not  been  able  to  avoid  that 
which  my  dear  mother  taught  me  to  hold  in  the  greatest 
detestation.  One  word  will  tell  you  all,  my  child:  we 
are  in  debt." 

"  In  debt  ? "  repeated  Eeine,  whom  the  sentence  as 
to  the  expenses  incurred  for  her  sake  had  struck  to  the 
very  heart.  It  was  indeed  true  that  nothing  had  been 
spared  in  her  education,  her  adornment,  her  pleasures. 
She  no  longer  thought  of  asking  herself  the  reason  for  all 
this  confidence  now  reposed  in  her  by  her  mother.  She 
felt  only  how  devoted  her  mother  had  been  to  her,  after 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  161 

her  fashion,  doubtless,  but  it  had  been  devotion  all  the 
same,  and  the  voice  of  the  lovely  child  sank  very  low 
as  she  answered  :  "  In  debt  ?  You  have  incurred  debts, 
and  for  me  ?  Ah !  mamma,  you  are  quite  right  not  to 
let  father  know  this.  But  how  can  they  be  paid  unless 
he  can  work  still  more  than  he  does  ?  Mon  Dieu  I " 
she  added  timidly,  "now  that  our  position  is  made, 
as  you  say,  is  it  not  possible  to  restrict  ourselves  ?  " 

"  And  in  what  ?  "  said  the  mother,  "  and  why  ?  To 
lose  all  that  has  been  won  with  so  much  difficulty  ?  No, 
my  child,  you  are  ignorant  of  life.  In  Paris,  to  reduce 
one's  style  of  living  is  social  suicide.  Once  in  my  life, 
when  I  was  at  your  age,  I  had  the  experience  of  that 
fatal  facility  with  which  the  world  forgets  those  who  have 
been  unfortunate.  Besides,  there  is  no  need  of  exag- 
gerating. It  is  only  that  we  have  run  behind.  We  owe, 
among  the  various  people  we  deal  with,  about  forty  thou- 
sand francs;  and  this  trifle  would  be  soon  paid  even 
with  your  father's  working  less  than  now,  if  —  " 

"  If  ?  "  asked  the  girl,  with  more  anxiety  than  ever. 
Although  she  did  not  allow  herself  to  judge  her  mother, 
she  could  not  but  understand  her  character,  and  she 
knew,  by  the  very  tone  in  which  this  word  "if"  had 
been  spoken,  that  here  was  the  important  point  in  the 
conversation.  Yes,  she  knew  it  by  the  tone  of  voice, 
altered  almost  imperceptibly,  but  altered,  nevertheless, 
with  the  changed  subject  —  by  the  look,  also,  which, 
fearing  to  meet  resistance,  grew  more  gentle,  almost  sup- 


162  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

plicating.  Evidently  the  confidential  disclosure  of  the 
previous  moment  was  only  a  preliminary  —  but  to  what  ? 
Between  the  simple  life  in  the  little  Provenqal  mas  and 
the  payment  of  the  eight  thousand  dollars  of  debts  — 
that  enormous  sum,  as  it  seemed  to  her  —  Reine  could 
not  establish  the  connection.  Her  heart  beat  violently 
as  she  perceived  suddenly  what  it  was,  while  she 
listened  to  Mme.  Le  Prieux's  commentary  upon  this 
formidable  "  if." 

"  Mon  Dieu  !  it  is  perfectly  simple.  If,  pretty  and  well 
bred  as  you  are,  there  should  be  found  some  good  fellow 
who  had  money,  a  great  deal  of  money,  and,  consequently, 
had  no  occasion  to  require  a  dowry ;  —  if  you  were  thus 
married,  well  married,  what  a  relief  it  would  be  to  your 
father !  And  I,  too,  should  be  rewarded  for  the  sacrifices 
of  a  lifetime.  What  is  it  that  I  have  desired,  I  ask  you 
again?  One  thing  only  —  that  your  father  and  you 
should  have  a  real  position  in  the  world.  You  would 
have  it  and  for  life.  The  rest  would  become  easy.  We 
could  then  economize,  pay  our  debts,  and  your  father 
could  take  some  rest.  Do  you  not  see  how  it  is  ?  When 
a  girl  is  very  closely  bound  to  her  parents,  as  you  are  to 
us,  there  are  a  great  many  little  ways  in  which  she  can 
be  useful  to  them.  We  should  have  the  same  acquaint- 
ances. If  you  received  every  week,  for  instance,  I  could 
make  my  dinners  and  receptions  less  frequent.  The 
civilities  that  you  offered  would  count  for  both.  You 
would  have  a  place  in  the  country  —  in  Touraine,  say, 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  163 

not  too  far  from  Paris.  Naturally,  we  should  be  there 
two  months  in  the  year.  Your  father  could  come  and 
go,  keep  on  with  his  work,  and  get  a  little  fresh  air,  and 
our  household  expenses  would  be  just  so  much  lessened. 
It  is  a  dream,  is  it  not?  But  there  are  dreams  which 
come  true.  All  we  need  is  that  my  charming  Reine 
should  meet  —  at  a  ball,  at  a  dinner,  wherever  she  goes, 
in  her  home,  even  —  a  young  man  who  would  appreciate 
the  treasure  that  she  is,  a  young  man  who  would  under- 
stand, too,  what  we  are,  and  to  whom  we  should  bring 
what  is  lacking  to  himself,  a  valid  social  position,  and 
who  would  bring  to  you  that  which  your  father  and  I  — 
to  our  despair  —  cannot  give  you." 

"  And  do  you  know  this  young  man  ?  "  Reine  asked. 
"  Tell  me  his  name,  mamma,  I  beg  you.     It  is  —  " 

"There  is  such  a  young  man,"  the  mother  replied. 
"  It  is  Edgard  Faucherot." 

"  Edgard  Eaucherot !  "  Reine  exclaimed.  "  Ah !  it  was 
to  speak  to  me  about  Edgard  Eaucherot  that  — "  She 
stopped.  The  image  of  her  father  came  before  her 
mind,  and  the  recollection  of  what  he  had  said,  and  the 
emotion  they  had  both  felt.  "And  does  my  father 
know  that  Edgard  Eaucherot  wishes  to  marry  me  ? " 

"Certainly,"  said  the  mother. 

"And  he  approves  of  this  marriage?"  Reine  continued. 

"  Why  should  he  not  ?  "  replied  Mme.  Le  Prieux ;  and 
she  added,  "and  yet  the  dear  man  has  no  idea  of  our 
situation  in  regard  to  money." 


164  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

Such  a  pallor  had  spread  itself  over  the  young  girl's 
face,  her  smothered  voice  revealed  such  a  shock,  that 
the  implacable  woman  was  struck  by  it.  She  was  not 
a  monster,  this  "beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux,"  although 
her  prolonged  exploitation  of  her  husband's  labour  in 
the  interest  of  a  vain  passion  for  luxury  was  very  nearly 
ferocious;  and  very  much  like  ferocity,  also,  was  her 
present  procedure  in  forcing  her  daughter  to  a  cruelly 
utilitarian  marriage.  It  was  simply  that  her  conscience 
had  been  vitiated  by  the  germs  of  corruption  with  which 
the  social  atmosphere  is  filled  —  a  corruption  which 
current  morality,  solely  concerning  itself  with  breaches 
of  the  seventh  commandment,  scarcely  at  all  notices. 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  believed  herself  a  good  woman,  and 
so  she  was,  in  the  ordinary  meaning  of  the  word.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  world  had  completely  abolished 
in  her,  by  daily  abuse  of  compromises,  that  noble  virtue 
of  uncompromising  veracity,  which  would  not  have 
suffered  her  to  conceal  from  her  husband  and  her 
daughter  the  advances  made  by  Mme.  Huguenin.  But, 
when  one  has  spent  years  in  receiving  cordially  the  per- 
son one  despises,  in  complimenting  the  person  one  hates, 
how  and  why  should  one  hesitate  to  practise,  with  a 
motive  considered  beneficent,  toward  one's  family,  the 
convenient  old  maxim  that  the  end  justifies  the  means  ? 
When  one  has,  during  these  same  years,  invariably 
found,  behind  even  the  least  acts  of  life,  money, 
always  money ;  when  one  has  seen  on  every  side,  this  all- 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  165 

powerful  money  solely  and  constantly  respected,  how 
and  why  fail  to  make  wealth  the  supreme  condition  of 
happiness  ?  The  world  teaches  further  to  the  common- 
place nature  —  and,  do  not  deceive  yourself,  vanity  of 
whatever  kind  implies  some  coarse  and  brutal  streak  in 
the  character  —  this  sad  truth,  that,  in  the  end,  need  is 
victorious  over  feeling,  and  that,  especially  in  marriage, 
the  surest  chance  for  harmony  lies  in  the  union  not  of 
hearts  but  of  interests.  And  so  let  us  give  due  credit  to 
this  mother,  who  was  so  serenely  preparing  to  sacrifice 
her  daughter,  for  the  scruple  which  made  her  say  now 
to  the  young  girl,  — 

"  But  what  is  the  matter,  Reine  ?  You  are  agitated, 
you  are  pale ! " 

"  It  is  nothing,  mamma,"  the  girl  said.  "  I  was  so 
unprepared  for  what  you  have  just  told  me.  I  was 
taken  by  surprise,  that  is  all." 

"Answer  me  frankly,"  said  the  mother.  "There  is 
no  one  else  ?  If  you  love  any  other  person  —  I  am 
your  mother,  you  must  tell  me.  If  you  would  prefer 
to  marry  some  one  else  ? " 

"  Certainly  not,  mamma,"  interrupted  Reine,  and 
her  voice  grew  more  steady  as  she  went  on :  "  There 
is  no  one  else  that  I  should  prefer  to  marry.  Only  — " 
she  added,  with  a  half  smile,  in  which  quivered,  in 
spite  of  herself,  the  revolt  of  her  youth,  asking, 
imploring,  a  little  respite  before  the  sacrifice — the 
respite  of    Jephthah's  daughter,  going  away  into  the 


166  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

mountains  to  weep  there  her  adieu  to  life,  and  hope, 
and  love  — "  only,  I  should  like  to  have  a  few  days 
to  accustom  myself  to  the  prospect  of  so  great  a  change, 
to  the  idea  especially  of  leaving  you  and  my  father. 
It  is  now  Tuesday.  Will  you  give  me  until  Saturday 
to  reply  to  M.  Faucherot's  proposal?  I  expect  to 
say  yes,"  she  had  the  strength  to  add;  "but,"  and,  in 
turn,  her  voice  grew  solemn,  "I  am  not  willing  to  say 
it,  until  I  have  had  time  to  think  very  seriously  on 
the  subject." 

"Very  well,"  rejoined  the  mother,  "we  will  wait 
till  Saturday."  She  would  undoubtedly  have  preferred 
an  immediate  acceptance,  enabling  her  to  set  Cruce  at 
work  at  once.  This  same  half  remorse,  which  had 
driven  her  to  question  Reine,  now  made  it  impossible 
for  her  to  refuse  to  the  girl  this  few  days'  grace.  In 
replying,  as  she  did,  so  indulgently,  did  she  not  deceive 
herself  into  thinking  that  she  respected  her  child's 
free  will  ?  This,  at  least,  is  what  she  said  to  Hector 
when,  as  soon  as  Reine  had  left  the  room,  he  came  in, 
testifying  thus  to  the  solicitude  he  felt,  and  showing 
that,  notwithstanding  his  work,  he  had  been  watching 
for  this  interview  to  terminate.  "  Well  ? "  he  said 
anxiously. 

"  Well ! "  the  mother  rejoined.  "  She  was  very  much 
disturbed,  very  much  touched,  also.  Very  much  dis- 
turbed at  the  idea  of  leaving  us,  which  was  perfectly 
natural ;  very  much  touched  also  by  the  feeling  which 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  167 

Edgard's  advances  reveal."  She  already  called  young 
Paucherot  by  his  Christian  name,  so  positively  did 
she  already  regard  him  as  her  son-in-law.  "I  did  not 
wish  to  urge  her.  I  gave  her  until  Saturday  to  reflect ; 
but  she  said  to  me  that  she  should  accept  him.  Ah ! 
mon  ami,  if  you  knew  how  happy  I  am ! " 


MME.    LE   PRIEUX'S    "  DAY  " 

While  this  devoted  mother  —  as  she  believed  herself 
to  be  —  was  announcing  in  these  terms  to  her  husband 
the  result  of  her  interview  with  their  daughter,  what  was 
that  daughter  doing,  that  other  victim,  but  alas !  a  more 
clear-sighted  one,  to  the  social  ambitions  of  this  terrible 
woman?  At  the  first  moment,  as  we  have  seen,  Keine 
had  been,  so  to  speak,  struck  down  by  the  double  revela- 
tion which  had  broken  in  upon  her  dream  of  happiness : 
she  had  shuddered  with  pity  at  the  gloomy  financial 
situation  of  her  parents ;  and  with  disappointment  —  a 
disappointment  that  was  akin  to  despair  —  on  being  told 
by  her  mother  that  her  father  desired  this  marriage  with 
young  Faucherot's  millions.  She  had  shuddered,  and, 
shuddering,  she  had  also  yielded.  In  saying,  as  she 
had  done,  that  she  should  probably  accept,  she  had  but 
thought  and  felt  aloud.  This  suddenness  in  renouncing 
what  she  considered  her  own  happiness  will  appear 
singular  only  to  those  who  have  forgotten  their  own 


168  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

youth  and  how  ready  the  soul  is,  at  that  age,  for  mag- 
nanimous impulses.  In  any  case,  Reine  would  have 
found  it  hard  to  repulse  an  appeal  like  that  which  her 
mother  had  so  artfully  addressed  to  her.  Resistance 
became  impossible  when  her  father  also  asked  of  her 
this  sacrifice ;  and,  as  we  have  seen,  it  was  Mme.  Le 
Prieux's  supreme  diplomacy  to  make  her  believe  that 
he  did  ask  it.  Yet,  as  we  have  also  seen,  the  gentle 
Iphigenia  of  this  domestic  tragedy,  without  refusing 
herseK  to  the  knife,  had  asked  a  respite.  Wliy?  For 
the  reason  that,  in  accepting  the  idea  of  self-immolation 
to  her  parents'  will,  she  could  not  fail  to  remember  that 
she  must  also  sacrifice,  at  the  same  moment,  another ;  and 
she  would  not  —  she  could  not  —  consent  to  this  second 
immolation,  without  having  flung  out  in  different  words 
toward  this  other,  the  cry  of  the  real  Iphigenia :  — 

"  Heaven  has  not  to  the  life  of  this  unfortunate 
Attached  the  happiness  of  your  destiny. 
Our  love  deceived  us —  " 

This  had  not  taken  the  distinctness  of  a  plan  in  her 
thoughts.  No.  She  had  only,  while  her  mother  was 
talking,  felt  a  great  place  in  her  heart  —  that  where  her 
dream  of  a  life  with  Charles  grew  and  blossomed  —  begin 
to  quiver  and  bleed.  She  realized  the  whole  truth  of  the 
martyrdom  to  which  filial  love  was  about  to  condemn 
her  only  when  she  was  alone  in  her  room,  waiting  —  for 
by  a  cruel  irony  of  fate,  this  Tuesday  was  Mme.  Le 


OTHEli   people's   LUXURY  169 

Prieux's  "  day  "  —  until  it  was  time  to  dress  and  aid  her 
mother  in  receiving  the  fellow- actors  in  this  social  drama, 
where  she  herself  was  about  to  play  a  cruelly  tragic 
rdle. 

The  young  girl  sat  down  in  her  little  room  after  she 
had  locked  the  door,  and  then  began,  as  she  looked  arovmd 
her,  to  weep  big,  continuous  tears,  which  ran  down  her 
cheeks  as  she  sat  there,  silent  and  motionless.  She  was 
bidding  adieu  to  the  Reine  —  not  very  happy,  but  still 
always  hopeful  —  who  for  years  had  lived  her  best  hours, 
those  that  she  could  win  from  society,  within  the  four 
walls  of  this  narrow  cell,  surrounded  even  there  by  the 
symbols  of  that  contradiction  which  underlay  her  whole 
life.  It  was  a  room  decorated  by  one  person  and  lived 
in  by  another.  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  from  her  daughter's 
earliest  infancy,  had  resolutely  trained  her  to  luxury, 
as  other  mothers  train  theirs  to  economy.  This  appar- 
ent eccentricity  had  its  motive ;  determined,  even  then, 
to  select  a  rich  son-in-law,  she  had,  as  it  were,  pre- 
pared Reine  for  her  future  position ;  and  this  young  girPs 
bedroom  told  the  story  of  the  strange  maternal  romance, 
in  its  hangings  of  pink  muslin  over  delicate  blue  striped 
silk,  its  silk  curtains  of  the  same  tone,  its  lacquered 
white  furniture  also  covered  with  blue  silk,  and  the 
many  silver  objects  of  the  toilet-table.  But  the  photo- 
graphs scattered  through  the  room  were  Reine's  choice, 
not  her  mother's ;  and  they  spoke  not  of  luxury  and  dis- 
play, but   of   family   affection   and   simple   friendships. 


170  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

These  portraits  were  not  of  the  rich  and  stylish  young 
acquaintances  whom  her  mother  had  sought  out  for 
her:  there  were  the  likenesses  of  the  grandparents  at 
Chevagnes,  whom  she  had  never  seen ;  a  picture  of  her 
father  in  his  youth,  and  one  of  her  mother,  before  the 
epoch  of  the  social  successes,  in  a  very  simple  gown; 
there  was  a  group  representing  the  Huguenin  cousins,  at 
the  door  of  their  mas,  the  father  and  mother,  and  Charles 
himself,  in  the  background.  There  was  also,  in  this 
museum  of  Seine's  aifections,  a  picture  of  the  not  very 
aristocratic  Fanny  Perrin  —  this  was  all ;  no  cotillon 
favours,  none  of  those  souvenirs  of  fetes  that  are  the 
usual  decorations  of  a  girl's  bedroom. 

In  a  corner  by  the  window,  a  little  old  Auvergnat 
writing-table  of  walnut  that  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had 
retained  as  of  the  nature  of  a  bibelot,  with  the  chair 
belonging  to  it,  had  been  the  property  of  Hector  as  a 
boy.  Upon  the  two  shelves  above  it  were  the  books 
which  Reine  specially  preferred :  her  father's  three 
volumes,  of  course,  and  with  them  the  gifts  of  this 
father,  who  had  delighted  to  cultivate  in  his  child 
the  tastes  akin  to  his  own:  the  tragedies  of  Racine, 
among  the  classics,  and,  among  modern  writers,  the 
Marie  of  Briseux,  the  Stances  et  Po^mes  and  the 
Epreuves  of  Sully-Prudhomme,  and  the  Derni^res  Pa- 
roles of  Antony  Deschamps.  A  few  religious  works 
filled  out  the  upper  shelf,  and  below  there  were  certain 
mysterious  volumes,  unusually  tall,  with  merely  dates 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  171 

stamped  upon  the  back.  These  contained,  cut  out  and 
pasted  upon  leaves  which  were  afterward  bound,  year 
by  year,  those  of  her  father's  newspaper  articles  which 
Keine's  ingenuous  idolatry  had  led  her  specially  to 
admire. 

Among  all  these  poor  objects  —  old,  faded  photo- 
graphs, old  provincial  furniture,  beloved  books,  —  at 
home,  in  short  —  how  miserable  and  deserted  the  sacri- 
ficed girl  felt  herself  !  Into  what  an  unspeakable  abyss 
of  misery  she  had  suddenly  fallen  with  that  instan- 
taneousness  of  submission  which  was  due  to  the  appeal 
her  mother  had  had  the  skill  to  make.  Alone  with 
herself,  how  she  again  felt  herself  ruled  by  a  duty 
which  she  was  incapable  even  of  questioning!  When 
the  master  feeling  of  her  life  had  been,  for  years,  a 
pity  every  day  growing  more  intense  for  the  slavery 
under  which  her  father  was  smothered,  how  could  she 
see  a  chance  of  lessening  that  slavery,  and  refuse  it? 
And  this  was  more  than  a  chance,  it  was  a  certainty. 
While  her  mother  went  on  talking,  the  sum  of  the  debts 
that  had  been  thus  revealed  to  her  was  translated  instantly 
in  her  thoughts  into  the  amount  of  labour  that  the  jour- 
nalist must  undertake  in  order  to  pay  them.  She  had 
so  often  made  this  mental  translation,  when  her  mother 
had  taken  her  to  the  dressmaker's  or  the  milliner's  and 
discussed  in  her  presence  the  order  of  a  gown  or  a 
bonnet  with  which  she  could  so  easily  have  dispensed. 
What  was  this  expenditure,  which  had  always  caused 


172  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

her  a  slight  remorse,  and  the  labour  corresponding  to  it, 
in  comparison  with  the  eight  thousand  dollars  confessed 
by  Mme.  Le  Prieux,  and  the  frightful  number  of  pages 
that  must  be  blackened  to  earn  them  ? 

E-eine  computed  them  anew,  these  pages,  in  the  soli- 
tude of  her  room,  and  she  was  all  the  more  crushed 
because  she  knew  well  her  father's  scrupulous  integrity. 
She  knew  well  that  from  the  day  when  he  should  learn 
the  truth  he  would  have  no  rest  until  every  bill  had  been 
paid  in  full.  And  it  rested  with  her  that  these  arrears 
should  be  liquidated  without  effort !  How  could  she  have 
the  strength  to  hesitate,  even  for  a  moment  ?  To  her 
mother's  unanswerable  arguments,  which  showed  her, 
in  the  opulence  of  her  future  life,  an  almost  daily  relief 
for  her  parents,  what  could  she  reply  ?  Nothing,  except 
that  her  affections  called  her  in  another  direction.  The 
question  lay,  therefore,  between  her  happiness  and  their 
happiness;  and  when  a  generous  heart,  at  twenty  years 
of  age,  recognizes  a  dilemma  like  this,  it  is  at  once 
resolved.  But  to  renounce  one's  happiness  is  not  to 
lose  the  right  of  weeping,  of  weeping  for  oneself,  and  it 
was  these  tears  of  the  suicide  that  wet  the  young  girl's 
face,  in  the  virginal  cell  where  she  had  had,  for  com- 
panions of  her  solitude,  so  many  sweet,  innocent  dreams 
of  the  future,  and  whither  she  had  now  fled,  not  to 
argue  with  herself,  but  to  suffer.  And  she  wept 
silently,  how  long  she  could  not  have  told,  until  the 
moment  when  an  idea  presented  itself  to  her  mind, 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  173 

and  brought  her  at  once  to  her  feet.  Her  slender  hands 
wiped  the  tears  away,  she  threw  back  her  head  with  a 
gesture  of  resolve,  and  said  aloud,  — 

"If  I  have  no  more  courage  than  this,  how  can  I 
give  any  to  Charles  ?  " 

The  brave  girl  completely  ceased  thinking  of  herself. 
To  feel  for  others  was  the  natural  instinct  of  the  exqui- 
site sensitiveness  which,  while  she  was  still  very  young, 
had  developed  itself  as  pity,  in  divining  and  in  shar- 
ing the  quiet  and  hidden  sadness  in  her  father's  destiny. 
And  now  she  was  thinking  only  of  Charles.  She  knew 
that  he  loved  her  so  truly.  She  herself  loved  him,  with 
an  affection  which  was  all  devotion  —  how  he  would 
suffer  in  knowing  that  she  was  the  wife  of  Faucherot, 
without  himself  having,  in  bearing  this  grief,  the  im- 
perative reasons  of  filial  duty  which  would  support 
her,  which  were  already  supporting  her!  She  took 
up  the  photograph  in  which  he  was  represented  stand- 
ing behind  his  parents.  It  was  only  the  work  of  an 
amateur  —  of  herself  —  made  at  the  time  she  visited 
Provence,  and  though  it  was  far  from  distinct,  and 
the  figure  of  the  young  man  in  the  background  was 
the  most  confused  of  all,  it  was  still  perfectly  recogniz- 
able, —  the  hair,  the  eyes,  the  smile,  and  a  certain  car- 
riage of  the  head,  slightly  to  one  side,  which  was  familiar 
to  her.  In  an  hallucination  that  vanished  as  suddenly  as 
it  came,  Reine  saw  him  thus,  as  he  would  be,  withdrawn 
to  his  own  home,  devouring  his  heart  with  sadness  while 


174  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

she  would  be  the  wife  of  another,  and  what  another ! 
The  vision  caused  her  such  distress  that  she  laid  down 
the  picture,  and  began  to  walk  up  and  down  in  the 
prison  of  her  narrow  room,  turning  over  in  her  mind 
the  one  question  on  which  all  the  living  strength  of 
her  soul  was  absorbed:  "In  what  way  shall  I  make 
known  to  him  this  frightful  news,  and  what  shall  I 
say  ?  " 

Yes,  what  could  she  say  ?  And  yet,  it  must  he  that 
she  herself  should  speak  to  him.  Reine  was  too  loyal 
to  her  heart's  core  not  to  understand  that,  from  the 
moment  when  she  accepted  the  idea  of  marrying  another 
man,  after  the  conversation  she  had  had  with  Charles, 
she  owed  to  him  an  explanation,  and  owed  it  to  him 
immediately.  Had  she  not  authorized  him  to  have  his 
mother  make  advances  the  idea  of  which  now  increased 
her  distress  ?  Having  too  much  confidence  in  her  own 
mother  to  imagine  that  the  latter  could  have  received 
this  communication  from  Mme.  Huguenin  and  concealed 
the  fact  from  herself,  Reine  trembled,  now,  lest  this 
letter  —  lately  so  much  desired  —  should  be  on  the  way. 
If  only  Mme.  Huguenin  had  delayed,  if  the  letter  had 
not  yet  been  sent,  if  there  were  still  time  to  prevent 
its  being  written,  and  to  spare  this  mortification  to 
the  parents  of  him  she  loved  ?  On  this  account  she 
must  speak,  and  at  once.  To  this  point  she  continually 
returned  —  to  speak ;  but  how  ?  An  interview,  in 
which  she  would  see  her  cousin  suffer,  and   suffer  at 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  175 

her  hands,  appeared  to  her  at  once  inevitable  and 
impossible.  What  pretext  could  she  find  to  justify  a 
withdrawal  from  the  promise  given  —  an  act  which  she 
herself,  with  the  fine  strictness  of  the  emotional  con- 
science that  one  has  at  twenty  years  of  age,  would  have 
characterized  as  monstrous,  if  she  had  seen  a  friend 
guilty  of  such  a  thing,  without  knowing  its  real  motive, 
and  this  real  motive  must,  at  all  risks,  be  kept  secret 
from  every  one,  most  of  all  from  Charles.  Even  though 
a  solemn  promise  had  not  prohibited  it  to  her,  all  her 
family  feeling,  all  her  modesty  of  soul  revolted  also 
at  the  thought  of  admitting  the  man  she  loved  into 
this  sad  domestic  secret,  the  hidden  martyrdom  of  her 
father,  her  mother's  ways  of  feeling.  She  still  refused 
to  judge  them  —  her  mother's  ways  of  feeling  —  even 
now,  but  she  had  not  the  least  doubt  what  Charles's 
opinion  of  them  would  be.  But  alas !  if  she  did  not 
confess  this  to  him,  —  and  she  would  rather  die,  —  how 
explain  to  him  her  own  conduct,  so  that  he  should  not 
judge  her,  herself  also,  with  severity  ?  What  could 
she  say  to  him?  That  she  had  reflected  and  found 
that  she  did  not  love  him  ?  After  their  so  recent 
conversation  at  the  ball,  when  she  had  spoken  to  him 
so  frankly,  he  would  not  believe  her.  And  then,  some- 
thing in  herself  protested  against  thus  calumniating 
her  own  heart.  The  very  young  have  a  scrupulous 
respect  for  their  emotions,  because  they  are  also  proud 
of  them.    And  this  too  legitimate  pride,  this  desire  to 


176  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

show  herself  in  the  truth  of  her  deepest  feelings,  with- 
out revealing  their  mysterious  cause,  at  last  inspired 
the  romantic  girl,  after  prolonged  and  painful  medita- 
tion, with  the  most  naive  and  audacious  of  projects, 
the  most  unreasonable  and  the  most  touching  —  yes, 
she  would  see  Charles  as  soon  as  possible,  and  she 
would  see  him  alone.  She  would  appeal,  in  this  inter- 
view, to  his  esteem,  to  his  confidence  in  her,  to  his 
love.  She  would  ask  him  to  believe  her,  to  believe 
that  she  had  spoken  the  truth  to  him,  that  she  had 
not  changed,  and  should  never  change  in  her  affection 
for  him;  and  she  would  at  the  same  time  declare  to 
him  that  they  must  renounce  their  dream  of  marriage, 
and  must  do  this  for  an  insurmountable,  a  sacred  reason, 
which  it  was  impossible  for  her  to  reveal  to  him.  She 
would  implore  him,  if  he  loved  her,  not  to  seek  to  know 
this  reason.  She  would  appeal  to  his  faith  in  her,  and 
he  would  understand  her  suffering  in  this  appeal  and  her 
sincerity.  She  would  understand  it,  if  it  were  addressed 
to  her.  Their  secret  betrothal  would  be  broken,  and  it 
would  be  a  frightful  moment  for  both.  But  at  least  she 
would  leave  him,  feeling  sure  that  he  did  not  despise  her. 
A  woman  who  loves,  though  she  be  as  ingenuous  and 
as  free  from  all  spirit  of  intrigue  as  was  this  innocent 
and  pure-minded  child,  is  always  a  little  tempted  to 
excuse  the  means  that  she  employs  in  the  service 
of  her  affection,  even  were  they  as  tortuous  as  the 
lies  of  the  Agnes  or  the  Kosine  of  comedy.     Reine 


OTHER  people's   LUXITRY  177 

was  neither  an  Agnes  nor  a  Eosine.  She  was  one 
of  those  charming  girls  of  the  old  French  bourgeoisie, 
all  acuteness,  but  all  truth.  She  had  an  innate  horror 
of  falsehood  which  made  her  hesitate,  at  the  moment  of 
carrying  out  her  plan,  before  one  thing  to  be  done  in 
its  execution,  which  will  seem  very  childish  to  the 
emancipated  of  contemporary  feminism.  The  cause 
of  hesitation  was  this :  to  talk  with  her  cousin  alone 
was  impossible  in  the  house.  He  himself  would  never 
have  asked  to  be  received  by  Reine  in  her  mother's 
absence,  and  at  the  mere  thought  that  perhaps  he 
would  come  on  their  "day,"  and  that,  under  her 
mother's  eye,  she  must  see  him  without  being  able 
to  speak  to  him  frankly,  the  young  girl  felt  herself 
grow  faint.  But  time  was  slipping  away.  The 
next  day,  in  the  morning,  she  was  to  go,  accompanied 
by  the  faithful  Fanny  Perrin,  to  one  of  the  fash- 
ionable lectures,  in  the  rue  Royale,  that  her  elegant 
education  required  her  to  attend.  Very  often,  when 
the  day  was  fine,  she  would  walk  for  some  time  with 
her  chaperon,  before  returning  to  the  house.  Her  first 
idea  was  to  send  word  to  Charles  to  meet  her  at  the 
Tuileries  or  in  the  Champs-Elysees,  in  the  morning. 
They  could  meet,  as  if  by  chance,  and  walk  a  short 
distance  together.  This  also  had  often  happened.  Yes, 
it  was  a  very  simple  and  very  sure  way.  Reine  went 
to  her  table  and  took  a  little  blue  telegram,  and  then, 
as  she  was  about  to  dip  her  pen  into  the  ink,  stopped 


178  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

short.  Another  thought  came  to  her  suddenly;  it  was 
not  the  writing  of  a  note  or  the  making  of  an  appoint- 
ment that  suddenly  alarmed  her.  Not  infrequently 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  desired  her  to  write  a  note  to 
her  cousin  to  change  the  date  of  an  invitation,  or 
to  offer  him  a  seat  in  their  box  at  the  theatre ;  and 
on  the  other  hand,  she  had  a  right  to  say  to  herself 
that  in  planning  this  meeting  she  was  obeying  only 
the  noblest  of  motives.  Nor  was  it  doing  a  thing  with- 
out her  mother's  knowledge  that  disturbed  her  thus. 
That  fair-mindedness  with  which  natures  capable  of 
resolute  action  judge  themselves,  made  her  institute 
something  like  a  comparison  between  this  lack  of  con- 
fidence and  the  sacrifice  upon  which  she  had  decided, 
for  this  mother. 

No ;  the  image  which,  at  this  first  moment,  prevented 
her  from  writing  her  generous,  imprudent  note,  was 
that  of  Mile.  Fanny  Perrin,  that  good  creature  whom 
she  knew  to  be  so  scrupulous,  so  attached  to  her  duty. 
She  knew  also  that  Panny  had  the  blindest  faith  in 
her,  that  never  a  doubt  would  arise  in  the  chaperon's 
mind  as  to  the  accidental  character  of  a  meeting  with 
Charles,  nor  any  objection  if  Reine  were  to  leave 
her  and  go  a  few  steps  forward  with  her  cousin,  offer- 
ing no  explanation  to  her.  To  deceive  this  discreet 
and  humble  friend  was  intolerable  to  the  young  girl. 
And  then  —  then,  love  gained  the  victory;  and  for  the 
first  and  last  time  in  her  life  the  scrupulous  Peine 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  179 

abandoned  herself  to  the  most  venial,  certainly,  and 
most  excusable,  of  compromises  with  conscience.  She 
promised  herself  that  she  would  tell  Fanny  Perrin, 
in  proposing  to  go  to  the  Tuileries,  that  she  was  expect- 
ing to  meet  Charles  there.  If  Fanny  objected  to  going, 
Eeine  would  give  it  up.  There  would  be  time  to 
make  some  other  plan.  If  Eeine  had  been  perfectly 
sincere  with  herself,  she  would  have  confessed  she 
ran  no  great  risk  of  being  obliged  to  make  a  new  effort 
of  the  imagination.  She  was  too  sure  that  Fanny, 
who  adored  her,  would  never  be  able  to  refuse.  How- 
ever, this  reservation  made  it  possible  to  resume  her  pen 
and  to  write  the  following  note :  — 

"  My  Cousin  :  I  beg  you,  to-morrow  morning,  between 
half-past  ten  and  eleven,  to  be  on  the  terrace  of  the 
Tuileries,  on  the  side  toward  the  Seine,  near  the  Or- 
angery. If  I  have  not  come  by  eleven  o'clock,  it  will  be 
because  something  absolutely  insurmountable  has  pre- 
vented me.  You  will  understand,  after  I  have  spoken 
with  you,  how  powerful  was  the  motive  which  has 
inspired  this  step  on  the  part  of 

"  Your  devoted  cousin, 

"Eeine  Le  Pbieux." 

After  she  had  written  the  address  of  this  card  tele- 
gram :  M.  Charles  Huguenin,  54  Eue  d'Assas,  it  occurred 
to  her  to  re-read  the  lines,  so  cold  though  written  with 
burning  fingers,  and  she  added  this  postscript,  underlin- 


180  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

ing  it,  "  I  also  beg  you  not  to  come  to  the  house  to-day." 
Then,  having  sealed  the  little  blue  paper,  she  carried  it 
herself  to  the  servant  who  was  laying  the  table  for 
breakfast,  and  sent  him  out  with  it  immediately.  She 
was  somewhat  pale  in  doing  this  thing,  for  her  so  extraor- 
dinary, so  far  outside  anything  she  had  ever  done  or 
thought  of  doing.  But  inasmuch  as  she  did  it  openly, 
frankly,  without  concealment,  at  the  risk  of  being  sur- 
prised by  her  father  or  mother,  she  said  to  herself  that 
she  was  incurring  danger  for  the  honour  of  her  afEection^ 
And  this  was  enough  to  save  her  from  shame  or  fear. 

Now,  she  must  wait ;  and  the  tranquillity  that  the  fact 
of  action  had  restored  to  her  was  to  be  worn  out,  minute 
by  minute,  second  by  second,  during  the  twenty-four 
hours  which  separated  her  from  this  interview  with 
her  cousin.  She  was  obliged,  first,  to  endure,  at  the 
breakfast  table,  the  glances  of  her  mother  and  her 
father  —  the  former,  triumphant  and  grateful;  the  lat- 
ter (and  this  aspect  could  not  but  increase  the  girl's 
discomfort)  as  if  touched,  surprised,  and  questioning. 
Happily,  he  went  away  very  early,  having  to  attend  a 
rehearsal.  "  The  fourth  this  week,"  he  groaned,  as  he 
took  leave  of  his  wife  and  daughter.  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
also  disappeared  very  soon,  to  prepare  for  her  "day," 
that  "Tuesday,"  to  which  had  been  subordinated  her 
own  existence,  and  her  husband's,  and  Keine's!  This 
weekly  task  had  never  been  agreeable  to  the  girl.  She 
accepted  it  ordinarily  witii  the  good-humour  of  her  age. 


OTHER   people's    LUXURY  181 

She  even  felt  remorse,  being  pious,  that  sometimes  she 
found  this  light  cross  painful.  That  afternoon  the 
string  of  visits  could  not  but  be,  and  was,  physically, 
almost  intolerable.  "Has  Charles  received  the  despatch? 
Yes,  if  he  is  at  home.  Mon  Dieu  I  if  only  he  does  not 
come  to-day !  If  he  has  received  it,  what  does  he  think  of 
me?  If  only  he  does  not  misjudge  me !  He  must  know 
that  there  is  something  serious.  If  only  he  is  not  too 
much  distressed !  I  ought  to  have  explained  to  him.  I 
could  not  in  writing."  These  were  the  sentences  spoken 
within  her,  while  she  was  attending  with  her  habitual 
carefulness  to  the  small  duties  assigned  to  her,  before 
the  appointed  three  o'clock,  at  which  hour  the  two  salons 
began  to  fill.  She  looked  at  the  flowers  in  the  vases,  and 
at  the  growing  plants,  at  the  bibelots  in  the  cabinets, 
and  at  the  fire  on  the  hearth.  She  saw  to  the  dining 
room  Avhere  the  luncheon  was  laid.  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
had  increased  her  available  space  for  receptions  by  mak- 
ing the  doors  of  this  room  slide  in  grooves,  so  that  it 
could  serve  as  an  extension  of  the  grand  salon.  These 
very  prosaic  duties  were  not  of  a  nature  to  silence  the 
low  voice  within  her  which  reminded  the  young  girl  of 
the  near  approach  of  the  formidable  interview,  any  more 
than  were  the  remarks  to  which  she  must  listen,  when 
the  usual  guests  began  to  arrive. 

And  yet,  it  was  rather  a  curious  sample  of  contem- 
porary Paris,  this  "  day  "  of  the  journalist's  wife,  and 
the  aspect  of  the  three  rooms,  about  five  o'clock,  proved 


182  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

that,  if  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  no  comprehension  of  the 
feelings  of  others,  she  had  in  the  highest  degree  the 
social  instinct  —  that  peculiar  and  indefinable  gift  of 
making  desirable  acquaintances.  Her  success  was  due, 
as  all  successes  are,  to  a  correct  foresight  as  to  causes. 
The  events  which  followed  her  father's  ruin  and  death 
had  revealed  to  this  woman  of  the  south  the  prime 
and  fundamental  truth  that  everything  has  its  price, 
in  society ;  and  she  was  able  to  understand  exactly 
how  much  her  husband's  means  enabled  her  to  give 
to  that  society  which  she  so  eagerly  loved.  She  also 
had  discerned  this  further  truth,  that  in  the  Paris  of 
our  day  there  is  not  one  circle  of  fashionable  society, 
but  twenty  or  thirty  of  these  circles ;  and  that  a  married 
couple  like  themselves,  without  family  support  or  any 
past,  must  be  contented  with  a  somewhat  peculiar  posi- 
tion, must  not  push  themselves  into  any  one  coterie 
but  make  their  own  for  themselves,  touching  upon 
all  but  making  no  effort  to  belong  completely  to  any 
one.  She  had  recognized,  lastly,  this  third  truth,  that 
it  is  in  social  relations  as  it  is  with  coins.  To  have 
a  louis  is  the  same  as  having  twenty  francs;  to  have 
a  hundred  francs  is  equivalent  to  having  five  louis. 
There  are  acquaintances  of  prime  importance  that  give 
you  at  one  stroke  ten  or  twenty  others,  and  there  are 
those  of  secondary  value  that  give  you  only  them- 
selves. 

The  influence  of  these  practical  axioms  was   shown 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  183 

in  the  very  make-up  of  this  salon,  on  the  Tuesday 
which,  this  time,  seemed  to  Reine  as  if  it  would  never 
end.  Why  had  the  journalist's  wife  a  Dowager-duchess, 
Mme.  de  Contay,  and  her  daughter,  the  pretty  young 
Countess  de  Bee-Crispin,  seated  there  on  one  of  her 
sofas  —  except  because  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  found 
means,  in  virtue  of  the  first  of  these  three  principles, 
to  put  at  the  service  of  certain  charities  in  which  the 
old  duchess  was  passionately  interested  the  influence 
of  Hector  in  the  theatres,  and  with  the  press  ?  Why, 
on  this  same  Tuesday,  had  she  there,  talking  with 
these  two  representatives  of  the  purest  aristocracy, 
Mme.  Jacques  Molan,  the  wife  of  the  celebrated  novel- 
ist, and  Mme.  Maxime  Fauriel,  the  wife  of  the  no  less 
renowned  pastellist?  This  was  because,  in  virtue  of 
the  second  principle,  she  had  never  made  the  mistake 
of  breaking  with  a  society  that,  in  the  depths  of  her 
soul,  she  described  as  Bohemian.  She  had  striven  to 
render  her  salon  amusing  by  making  it  a  kind  of 
neutral  ground  where  people  belonging  to  a  more 
exclusive  circle  could  meet  the  very  flower  of  artistic 
and  literary  Paris.  Why,  still  on  this  same  Tuesday, 
were  the  Countess  Abel  Mose  and  her  cousin,  the 
Baroness  Andermatt,  there,  who  had,  each  of  them, 
nearly  as  many  million  francs  as  the  hard-working 
Hector  wrote  articles,  yearly  ?  This  was  because  the 
two  beautiful  Jewesses  were  particularly  grateful  to  the 
journalist  for  having,  at  the  opening  of  the  anti-Semitic 


184  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

campaign,  taken  that  position  of  moderate  liberalism 
which  he  still  holds,  and  for  having  taken  it  with 
absolute  disinterestedness.  It  may  be  guessed  by 
whose  advice.  And  notice  the  keen  scent  of  old 
Gruce's  pupil :  Mmes.  de  Contay  and  de  Bee-Crispin 
are  good  for  more  than  ten  acquaintances  in  the  best 
society;  with  Mme.  Molan  and  Mme.  Fauriel,  a  place 
is  retained  in  the  two  houses  where  young  literary 
Paris  is  always  to  be  found;  with  the  presence  of 
the  Countess  Mos^  and  the  Baroness  Andermatt,  invi- 
tations are  secured  in  all  the  high  society  of  Israel. 
Who  can  wonder  that  a  house  frequented  by  these 
heads  of  columns  should  never  be  scant  of  guests, 
and  that  forty  persons,  ladies  and  men,  may  be 
counted  there  on  this  particular  Tuesday  ?  And  is  it 
not  legitimate  that  she  who  has  created  this  "salon," 
should  regard  with  pride  the  fresh  or  faded  faces 
that  smile  under  the  bonnets,  in  the  light  of  the  elec- 
tric lamps?  She  knows  both  what  to  say  to  bring 
this  smile  to  each  visitor's  face,  and  what  the  cost 
was  of  the  bonnet.  She  knows  the  value  of  all  these 
toilettes,  and  how  to  please  each  one  of  these  decorated 
vanities.  One  thing,  however,  escapes  her  knowledge 
—  and  that  is,  how  tired  Reine  is  of  pouring  tea  or 
chocolate  and  offering  cake  to  these  indifferent  peo- 
ple, and  how  worn  out  with  all  this  talk,  which  she 
knows  by  heart.  How  wearisome,  for  instance,  to 
hear  the  duchess  narrate  her  plans  for  a  charity  fgte, 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  185 

the  five  hundredth  that  she  has  organized !  She  is 
an  enormous  person,  with  the  look  of  a  market  woman 
from  the  Halles,  very  red  and  very  haughty,  who  has 
a  very  grand  air  with  a  stout  figure,  and  talks  in  a 
loud  voice,  cutting  her  sentences  off  with  a  "  not  more," 
inexplicable  —  unless  it  be  because  she  has  begged  too 
often :  — 

"This  time  we  should  have  to  have  the  Palais  de 
1' Industrie,  and  for  two  days.  Not  more.  At  twenty 
francs  admission,  and  five  francs  each  visit  to  one  of 
the  compartments.  Not  more.  There  will  be  twenty  of 
these  compartments,  not  more,  and  in  each  one,  for  a 
half  hour,  during  those  two  days,  all  the  famous  men  in 
Paris  would  come  and  work  under  the  eyes  of  the  public, 
just  as  in  their  own  rooms  or  studios.  Not  more.  Do 
you  see  ?  Allowing  eight  hours  a  day,  that  would  give 
us  thirty-two  half  hours.  We  should  ask  the  thirty 
most  famous  writers.  For  the  poor,  they  would  not 
refuse  to  do  it.  Yes,  we  should  ask  them  to  sit  down 
for  just  thirty  little  minutes  at  a  table,  not  more,  and 
write  what  they  pleased,  the  musicians  to  play  what 
they  pleased,  the  artists  to  paint  what  they  pleased. 
The  thirty  most  famous  lawyers  would  argue  on  any 
subject  they  pleased  for  half  an  hour,  not  more ;  or  else 
they  might  prepare  a  speech.  The  doctors  would  bring 
their  students,  and  give  a  lecture  on  whatever  they 
pleased.  If  we  have  this  in  May,  when  strangers  are 
in  Paris,  we  should  have  ten  thousand  visitors.     Not 


186  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

more.  That  would  make  two  hundred  thousand  francs 
for  our  poor  consumptives ;  and  each  person  would  visit 
at  least  four  of  the  compartments,  which  would  be 
another  two  hundred  thousand  francs.  Ask  M.  Le 
Prieux  what  he  thinks  of  my  idea  ?  " 

Yes,  how  weary  Eeine  is  of  being  obliged,  again  to-day, 
to  lend  an  appearance  of  attention  to  one  of  the  fantas- 
tic projects  in  which  the  activity  of  the  grande  dame 
expends  itself,  while  her  mother  smiles  at  sentences 
behind  which  the  girl,  with  her  sensitive  susceptibility, 
discerns  that  ingenuous  and  insulting  conception  of  the 
famous  artist  which  women  too  high  of  rank  are  so  apt 
to  form  —  they  are  curious  animals  to  be  placed  on 
exhibition. 

In  like  manner,  other  sentences  interest  the  mother 
prodigiously  —  to  judge  by  the  expressions  of  admiration 
wherewith  she  punctuates  them  —  which  appear  almost 
offensive  to  the  sensitive  Reine.  These  pass  between 
the  two  cousins,  Mme.  Abel  Mose  and  Mme.  Andermatt, 
talking  not  less  frankly  than  the  duchess,  without  sus- 
pecting—  for  they  are  generous  and  kindly  —  the  sar- 
casm that,  in  this  atmosphere  where  elegance  is  a  feat 
of  legerdemain,  is  contained  in  their  frank  allusions  to 
certain  figures  of  expense. 

"Yes,"  says  Mme.  Andermatt,  after  relating  the 
details  of  a  separation  between  a  husband  and  wife, 
who  are  nearly  connected  with  herself,  "Solomon" 
(her  own  husband)   "succeeded  in  convincing   Saki" 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  187 

(the  husband  in  the  story)  "that  he  must  act  like  a 
'gentleman.'  No  matter  if  they  could  not  get  on  to- 
gether, there  was  nothing  really  wrong  about  Esther. 
She  is  the  mother  of  his  two  sons.  He  owes  it  to  himself 
that  she  should  be  able  to  live  decently.  Saki  admitted 
it  all,  and  what  do  you  suppose  he  allows  her  ? "  — 

"Kich  as  he  is,"  Mme.  Mose  emphasized,  "for  he 
has  at  least  fifty  millions."  — 

"  Very  well,"  resumed  Mme.  Andermatt,  "  sixty  thou- 
sand francs  a  year  —  six  thousand  a  month.  Why,  she 
used  to  spend  as  much  as  that  on  her  lingerie.  How  is 
she  going  to  live  ?  " 

Yes.  How  was  the  young  baroness,  Esther  Wismar, 
going  to  live  ?  This  is  the  question  put  to  each 
other,  with  evident  compassion  and  the  most  amusing 
seriousness,  by  the  five  ladies  who  listened  to  this  reve- 
lation of  the  ungentlemanly  conduct  of  Saki  Wismar,  the 
rich  banker.  Eeiiie  would  have  considered  this  com- 
passion as  gently  comic,  had  it  not  been  that  one  of 
these  five  ladies  was  her  father's  wife,  and  had  she  not 
known  what  she  did  know  about  the  condition  of  their 
affairs.  She  has  not  time,  however,  to  abandon  herself 
to  this  painful  feeling,  for  she  has  just  heard  Mme. 
Molan  —  whom  she  has  approached  for  the  purpose  of 
offering  her  a  second  cup  of  tea  —  say  to  her  friend,  Mme. 
Eauriel,  — 

"  Tiens,  Laurence !  Here  comes  Snobinette  ;  and  the 
duchess  and  the  countess  are  just  leaving !     Tableau ! " 


188  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

"Marie,  Marie,"  rejoins  Mme.  Fauriel,  "Reine  will 
scold  you ;  she  has  a  weakness  for  Mme.  Faucherot." 

And,  indeed,  it  is  Edgard's  mother  who  has  just 
entered,  and  as  if  to  justify,  on  the  instant,  Mme. 
Fauriel's  little  mischievous  remark,  she  makes  her 
way,  through  the  groups  whose  idle  talk  fills  the 
two  rooms,  to  where  Keine  stands.  She  kisses  her, 
the  poor  girl,  who  grows  icy  cold  under  the  kiss.  Reine 
is  too  acute  herself  not  to  be  conscious  that  Laurence 
Fauriel  is  annoyed  that  she  should  have  heard  Mme. 
Molan's  not  particularly  witty  sneer.  But  why,  unless 
it  were  that  the  plan  of  her  marriage  with  Edgard 
Faucherot  is  already  known  and  commented  upon  ? 
And  then,  the  mother  of  Edgard  has,  in  this  sudden 
affection  for  herself,  a  kind  of  entering  into  posses- 
sion ;  and  this  idea  sends  through  the  girl's  veins  the 
shiver  of  a  gazelle  under  the  paw  of  a  lioness  —  if, 
indeed,  such  a  comparison  is  permissible  in  speaking 
of  a  person  so  far  from  leonine  as  the  former  sales- 
woman of  the  house  of  "  Hardy,  Faucherot,  Silk  and 
Velvet."  This  individual,  six  times  millionnaire,  is 
a  little  woman  of  forty-five,  who  has  remained  very 
slender  and  still  young  in  her  appearance.  She  pos- 
sesses, if  you  observe  her  in  detail,  all  sorts  of  traits 
which  should  make  her  a  distinguished  woman:  small 
feet  and  slender  hands,  a  fine  figure,  regular  features, 
large,  brown  eyes  with  finely  pencilled  eyebrows,  and 
regular  white  teeth.      She  is  dressed  in  the  latest  style, 


OTHBK   people's   LUXURY  189 

and  the  blue  fox  that  she  wears  would  not  disgrace  the 
shoulders  of  a  princess  of  the  blood.  With  all  this  — 
explain  the  mystery  !  —  there  is,  as  if  diffused  over  her 
whole  being,  a  character  absolutely,  irremediably  com- 
mon. She  is,  so  to  speak,  the  exact  inverse  of  the 
duchess,  so  impressive,  with  all  which  would  naturally 
render  her  vulgar,  in  appearance,  colour,  figure,  and 
toilette.  During  the  moment  that  they  were  together 
on  the  threshold  of  the  door,  the  contrast  in  exterior 
conditions  was  apparent,  as  one  compared  the  huge 
figure  of  Mme.  de  Contay  and  Mme.  Paucherot's  slender 
figure,  the  latter's  elegant  furs  and  the  faded  and  yellow 
old  sable  of  the  former.  And  yet,  even  at  a  glance,  no 
person  could  have  failed  to  know  which  was  the  duchess 
and  which  the  bourgeoise.  By  what  sign  ?  By  the  ease 
of  the  former,  and  the  stiffness  of  the  latter  ?  By  the 
kind  of  imposing  good-nature  and  gay  certainty  of  the 
one,  and  the  too  emphatic  arrogance  of  the  other? 
Who  will  ever  be  able  to  define  that  assemblage  of  noth- 
ings that  are  summed  up  in  the  word  "  race  "  ?  These 
nothings  are  doubtless  only  the  showing  through  of 
secret  and  uncontrollable  elements  hidden  in  the  inner- 
most depths  of  the  soul  which  forbid  or  command  certain 
methods  of  thinking.  The  person  whom  Mme.  Molan 
had  called  by  the  sportive  nickname  of  "  Snobinette  " 
gave  still  further  proof  of  this  by  saying  to  Reine,  after 
the  first  effusiveness,  — 

"  Is  it  not  the  Duchess  de  Contay  who  has  just  gone 


190  OTHER    people's   LUXURY 

away?  And  I  wanted  so  much  to  meet  her!  Why- 
did  you  not  let  me  know?  See  how  unlucky  I  was. 
I  missed  seeing  her  by  being  detained  in  a  block  of 
carriages.  I  told  my  coachman  to  come  through  the 
narrow  streets.  After  all,  there's  nothing  so  disagree- 
able as  to  have  a  pair  of  horses  that  have  cost  ten  thou- 
sand francs.  One  is  always  afraid  of  their  getting 
injured.  You  are  quite  right,  you  and  these  ladies,  in 
having  them  by  the  month.  Then  you're  not  afraid  to 
move  —  " 

And  Edgard's  mother  continues,  without  remarking 
the  ironical  smile  on  the  lips  of  the  two  sly  Parisian 
women  as  they  listen,  nor  the  sad  look  that  her  foolish- 
ness brings  into  the  eyes  of  the  young  girl  whom  she 
has  chosen  for  a  daughter-in-law,  until  at  last  Eeine 
interrupts  her,  saying, — 

"  AVill  you  have  tea  or  chocolate  ?  One  ought  to  take 
something  warm,  the  day  is  so  cold." 

"Which  did  the  duchess  take?"  Mme.  Faucherot 
asked ;  and,  on  being  told :  "  Then  I  will  take  some  tea, 
like  her.  Tell  me,  does  she  come  here  often  ?  Oh,  if 
I  had  only  known !  And  I  had  been  so  pleased  to  buy 
those  horses  of  Mme.  de  Candale !  For  they  were  hers, 
you  know.  They  were  sent  to  Tattersall's,  and  I  said 
I  would  have  them  at  any  price.  And  see  now  what 
they  have  made  me  miss ! " 


OTHER   people's  LUXURY  191 

VI 

CHARLES   HUGUENIN 

One  of  the  poets  whose  verses  Hector  Le  Prieux  had 
taught  his  daughter  to  love  —  the  subtle  and  sensitive 
Sully-Prudhomme  —  is  the  author  of  this  line,  so  strong 
in  meaning  while  so  simple  in  words,  — 

"  jFf  les  heures  arrivent  toutes,^^ 

a  profound  expression  of  the  twofold  sadness  of  expect- 
ancy —  that  of  the  steady  passage  of  time,  and  that  of  its 
rapid  passage.  Eeine  had  experienced  the  former,  while 
she  endured  the  lazy  hours  of  her  mother's  "  Tuesday  " 
and  of  the  social  duties  which  followed,  for  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  had  required  her  presence  at  a  dinner-party  and 
two  balls  that  evening.  And  when  at  last  she  was  at 
home,  and  free  to  remain  alone  with  herself,  she  began 
to  suffer  the  other  pang  —  that  of  feeling  how  brief  and 
few  were  the  moments  which  separated  her  from  her  in- 
terview with  Charles.  Twelve  times  sixty  minutes,  eleven 
times,  ten  times,  nine  times  —  and  she  would  be  face  to 
face  with  her  cousin!  What  should  she  say  to  him? 
Lying  in  her  little  bed,  in  the  darkness,  she  heard  the 
ticking  of  the  clock  fill  the  room  with  that  implacable 
sound  which  is  like  the  irresistible  footsteps  of  Time, 
and  she  strove  to  frame  in  her  thoughts  the  sentences 
that  to-morrow  she  must  speak.  The  more  she  sought 
for  words,  the   more   she  found  herself  powerless  to 


192  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

express  what  she  desired  to  say  —  all  her  love,  and  this 
was  a  farewell;  all  her  fidelity,  and  this  was  to  break 
off;  all  her  grief,  and  it  was  her  absolute  duty  to  con- 
ceal the  sacrifice.  After  many  prayers  she  slept,  with 
a  feverish  sleep  from  which  she  awakened  more  tran- 
quil. The  necessity  for  action,  with  its  strain  upon  her 
nerves,  was,  for  the  moment,  as  it  will  sometimes  hap- 
pen, a  tonic.  It  was  her  intention  to  give  her  morning 
glance  at  her  father's  room  so  early  and  so  rapidly  that 
she  would  escape  meeting  him,  fearing  that,  if  he  spoke 
to  her,  she  might  lose  her  self-control,  and  might  betray 
herself,  before  the  irreparable  act  was  done.  This  she 
accomplished  so  well  that  her  daily  inspection  was  over 
when  Le  Prieux,  himself  somewhat  earlier  than  usual, 
came  to  his  work.  Oh,  the  misunderstandings  of  heart 
between  a  father  and  his  child,  when  each  has  for  the 
other  only  respect,  devotion,  adoration!  Hector  had 
taken  pains  to  be  early  on  the  spot,  in  the  hope  of  find- 
ing his  daughter  there,  as  he  so  often  did,  and,  without 
seeming  to  do  it  intentionallj'',  bringing  about  an  explar 
nation  with  her  as  to  the  Faucherot  marriage,  which 
still  caused  him  anxiety.  The  sovereign  ascendency 
that  his  wife  exercised  over  him  had  prevented  him, 
the  day  before,  from  asking  Reine  to  come  to  him  alone 
that  he  might  question  her.  He  felt  quite  sure  that  his 
daughter  would  be  glad  to  meet  him  alone,  and  it  was 
a  real  disappointment  when  he  entered  his  room,  and 
saw  his  table  arranged,  the  paper  lying  ready,  the  pens 


OTHER   people's    LUXURY  193 

in  their  place,  the  fire  burning  brightly,  and  the  gentle 
fairy  gone,  who  had  made  the  room  ready  for  him. 

"She  was  not  willing  to  have  me  talk  with  her 
about  this  marriage,"  he  thought  to  himself,  "and 
why  ?  " 

"While  the  father  was  putting  this  question  to  him- 
self and  could  find  no  answer  and  dared  not  go  to 
his  daughter's  room,  out  of  deference  to  what  he 
regarded  as  her  wish,  Eeine  was  saying  to  herself, — 

"Now  he  is  calmly  at  work.  He  is  satisfied.  If 
he  knew  what  it  has  cost !     May  he  never  know  ! " 

She  was  perfectly  sincere  in  what  she  said,  and  still 
the  idea  of  her  father's  unconsciousness  was  so  pain- 
ful to  her  that  she  experienced  a  sensation  of  being 
really  consoled  —  the  first  feeling  of  anything  but 
distress  that  she  had  had  since  the  fatal  interview  of 
the  preceding  morning  —  when,  at  about  half-past  nine, 
she  beheld  appearing  before  her  the  ugly  but  affectionate 
face  of  Fanny  Perrin.  This  elderly  person  was  short 
and  stout,  with  a  head  much  too  large  for  her  body. 
Her  thick  lips  and  her  flattened  nose  gave  her  a 
bull-dog  look,  corrected  by  her  blue  eyes  of  a  frank 
sweetness  almost  charming  in  this  face.  Her  faded 
complexion,  rendered  sallow  by  habitually  poor  food, 
looked  more  withered  still  from  the  colourless  tone 
of  the  hair,  still  blond  but  as  if  washed  out  or  as  if 
faded  by  the  sun.  With  this,  poor  Fanny,  who  had,  for 
many  years,   worn   no  other   clothes   than   the   cast-ofE 


194  OTHER    people's   LUXURY 

things  of  her  rich  patronesses,  was  always  arrayed  in 
the  garments,  at  once  conspicuous  and  caricatural,  of 
the  poor  relation.  The  material  was  always  sumptu- 
ous and  shabby,  the  style  elaborate  and  no  longer 
fashionable,  the  fitting  complicated  and  incorrect.  It 
was  the  same  with  her  shoes  and  her  bonnets.  "  I 
shall  never  have  anything  really  new  and  made  for 
me  till  I  have  my  coffin,"  the  clever  creature  would 
say.  The  misery  of  such  an  existence  lies  more  in 
presents  than  it  does  in  privations.  The  insolence 
with  which  a  favour  is  done,  usually,  to  these  half- 
parasites,  so  frequently  forces  them  to  be  ungrateful 
that  they  experience  infinite  thankfulness  toward  the 
considerate  benefactor  whose  gifts  they  can  acknowl- 
edge, not  with  the  lips  only,  but  with  the  heart. 
Reine's  thoughtful  kindness  toward  poor  old  Fanny 
had  been  repaid  by  the  most  ardent  devotion  on  the 
part  of  the  latter,  and,  though  in  no  way  akin,  it  hadr 
seemed  to  give  her  that  power  of  discernment  in  the 
things  which  concerned  Eeine  which  is  a  tender 
mother's  privilege,  and  this  she  proved  anew  on  the 
morning  of  which  we  speak.  No  sooner  had  Mile. 
Perrin  remarked  the  young  girl's  pallor  and  her  look 
of  extreme  fatigue,  than,  without  any  reference  to 
merely  physical  health,  she  asked  at  once, — 

"What  is  it,  Eeine?  Something  has  happened  — 
something  very  serious.  Do  not  deny  it.  I  am 
sure  —  " 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  195 

"  Something  has  happened,"  the  girl  replied.  "  But 
do  not  ask  me.  What  I  can  tell  you,  I  will:  and  all 
the  more  because  I  expect  a  great  service  from  you. 
But  I  want  you  to  understand  that  I  shall  not  be  dis- 
pleased if  you  feel  that  you  must  not  do  what  I  ask." 

"  I  have  no  fear,"  rejoined  Mile.  Perrin ;  "  what  could 
my  darling  Reine  ask  me  to  do  that  would  be  wrong  ?  " 
Then,  as  the  young  girl  remained  silent,  she  continued, 
with  a  timidly  inquiring  tone,  like  a  person  who  antici- 
pates a  sad  confession,  and  seeks  to  be  forgiven  for 
foreseeing  what  it  is  to  be,  "  This  thing  which  has 
happened,  Reine,  has  something  to  do  with  your  being 
married,  is  it  not  ?  " 

"  It  has  something  to  do  with  my  being  married," 
Reine  answered,  in  an  almost  inaudible  voice. 

"  And  to  some  one  whom  you  do  not  love  ? "  Fanny 
ventured  to  say. 

"And  to  some  one  whom  I  do  not  love,"  Reine 
repeated. 

And  now  it  was  Fanny's  turn  to  be  silent.  She  had 
long  since  divined  Reine's  feeling  for  her  cousin,  with- 
out ever  alluding  to  it,  and  she  would  not  have  dared 
to  be  the  first  to  speak  of  it  now.  On  her  part,  Reine 
was  already  repenting  that  she  had  said  so  much.  She 
took  the  hand  of  her  humble  companion. 

"I  have  expressed  myself  badly,"  she  said  implor- 
ingly. "Do  not  suppose  that  any  one  wishes  to  force 
me  to  this  marriage.     It  has  been  spoken  of  to  me, 


196  OTHER  people's   LUXURY 

and  I  feel  that  it  is  more  reasonable  for  me  not  to 
refuse.  However,  this  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
request  I  have  to  make.  I  want  very  much,"  and  she 
put  into  the  words,  emphasizing  them  by  repetition, 
all  the  sad  energy  of  a  supreme  appeal,  "I  want  very 
much  to  speak  with  some  one  for  a  few  moments  alone. 
I  have  written  to  this  person  to  meet  me  on  the  terrace 
of  the  Tuileries  when  we  come  from  the  lecture.  If 
you  tell  me  that  you  are  not  willing  to  go  with  me,  I 
shall  not  go.  In  regard  to  the  motive  which  requires 
me  to  do  this,  spare  me  all  questions,  I  beg  you,  if 
you  love  me.  Only  be  sure  that  I  have  too  much 
respect  for  you  to  involve  you  in  anything  that  is 
wrong ! " 

"  Dear  Eeine,"  interrupted  her  visitor,  eagerly,  "  I 
know  it ; "  and  without  direct  reply  to  the  request  made 
her,  "  Come,"  she  continued,  '•'  we  shall  be  late  for  the 
lecture.  Fortunately,  it  is  fine  weather  for  a  walk, 
this  morning." 

There  was,  in  this  last  little  sentence,  accompanied 
by  an  affectionate  glance,  all  the  feminine  finesse  of 
which  old  Fanny,  aged  fifty-five,  was  capable,  not  will- 
ing to  say  a  distinct  "  yes,"  to  a  request  too  manifestly 
connected  with  a  love  affair,  and  yet  saying  "yes," 
and  feeling  greatly  upset  by  this  complicity.  In  fact, 
when,  two  hours  later,  the  two,  after  the  close  of  the 
lecture,  found  themselves  upon  the  sidewalk  of  the 
rue  Koyale,  and  started,  without  a  word  of  explanation 


OTHER   PEOPLE  S   LUXURY  197 

on  either  side,  as  if  by  tacit  accord,  toward  the  place 
de  la  Concorde  and  the  gate  of  the  Tuileries,  the  one 
whose  heart  was  beating  quickly  was  not  Reine, 
Twenty  times  over,  during  the  five  minutes  in  which 
they  were  going  this  short  distance,  the  scruples  of 
the  chaperon  came  near  being  stronger  than  her 
implied  promise;  and,  each  time,  a  glance  at  Reine, 
and  the  earnest  and  suffering  look  on  that  noble  face, 
arrested  the  objection  in  her  conscience  and  upon  her 
lips. 

Thus  they  arrived,  without  having  exchanged  a  word, 
upon  the  terrace  of  the  Orangery,  where  they  perceived, 
and  this  time  with  equal,  though  so  different,  emotion, 
the  figure  of  Charles  Huguenin,  who  awaited  them. 
It  was  indeed  an  ideal  scene  for  an  adieu  like  that 
to  which  Seine  came,  —  this  spot  in  prosaic  Paris,  on 
this  icy  and  misty  winter  morning.  In  the  place 
de  la  Concorde,  clear  and  light,  the  marine  divinities 
of  the  two  great  fountains  rose  aloft,  all  covered  with 
glittering  ice.  The  obelisk  between  them  looked  pink, 
and  in  the  distance  the  Arc-de-Triomphe  was  indistinct 
through  the  mist.  A  white  sun  was  coming  up  in  the 
sky,  without  clouds,  yet  as  if  draped  with  a  veil  of 
frost.  The  basin  of  the  Tuileries,  at  the  foot  of  the 
terrace,  was  covered  with  ice,  grayish,  and  streaked  by 
skaters,  three  little  boys,  whose  steel  blades,  in  the 
silence  of  the  vacant  garden,  were  heard  to  grate  upon 
the  smooth  mirror ;  and  in  the  centre  of  the  basin,  the 


198  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

jet  which  rose  but  a  little  way  still  kept,  with  a 
smothered  sob,  a  trifle  of  water  alive  and  supple.  Be- 
tween the  trunks,  slender  or  robust,  of  the  young  or 
old  chestnut  trees  the  stone  statues  seemed  also  to  have 
been  chilled  motionless  by  the  cold  of  the  day.  Other 
ponds  of  water,  frozen  under  the  shrubbery  of  the 
alleys,  shone  here  and  there  like  fragments  of  broken 
metal  that  had  fallen  upon  the  dull  surface  of  the 
sand,  and  a  dull,  all-pervading  sound,  the  noise  of  the 
great  city,  enwrapped  the  deserted  terrace.  Not  a 
person  was  there — besides  the  two  women  who  had 
just  come  and  the  young  man  who  awaited  them  — 
but  one  old  lady,  a  foreigner,  in  a  sealskin  coat,  who 
was  throwing  a  ball  for  two  large  collies  with  long 
tawny  hair,  who  barked  furiously  as  they  ran. 

Yes,  what  a  scene  of  sadness  and  farewell!  But 
Charles  Huguenin  was  a  lover,  and  for  a  lover  who 
knows  himself  loved,  no  scene  is  sad  but  that  where 
she  is  not.  He  had  seen  Reine  appear  on  the  sidewalk 
at  the  corner  of  the  rue  Royale,  frail  and  slender  in 
her  astrakhan  jacket,  and,  for  him,  the  air  became  mild, 
the  veiled  sky  was  full  of  radiance,  this  landscape  of 
bare  branches  and  frozen  waters  adorned  itself  with 
the  gay  hues  of  spring.  She  was  coming,  —  his  exqui- 
site fiancee;  long  had  he  desired  to  call  her  by  this 
name,  without  even  daring  to  hope  for  it,  —  she  who, 
by  her  advice,  her  sweet,  persuasive  influence,  had 
saved  him  from  being  ensnared  by  the  factitious  life 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  199 

of  Paris,  who  had  revived  in  him  the  love  of  his  distant 
home,  and  an  affection  for  a  true  and  simple  exist- 
ence; she  would  soon  be  his  wife;  he  would  take  her 
away  to  that  beautiful  land,  to  his  father's  house,  so 
white  amid  the  dark  cypress  trees ;  and  the  dear  face, 
whose  thinness  tortured  him  at  times,  would  grow 
round  and  rosy  and  brilliant  in  the  fragrant  southern 
air.  It  is  true  that,  the  evening  before,  on  reading 
his  cousin's  despatch,  Charles  had  had  a  feeling  of 
surprise  and  anxiety,  but  only  for  a  moment,  how- 
ever. His  character  possessed  one  of  the  charming 
traits  of  the  southern  nature  —  that  nature,  complex 
and  contradictory,  whose  hard  realism  can  be  so  im- 
placable, as  in  Mme.  Le  Prieux;  whose  supple  sensi- 
tiveness can  be  so  graceful,  as  in  Charles.  This  heir 
of  the  Huguenins,  those  old  provincial  vine-dressers, 
so  profoundly,  so  absolutely  sons  of  the  soil,  had  that 
optimistic  patience  into  which  there  enters  a  little  of 
the  indolence  of  too  mild  a  climate,  but  also  a  little 
of  that  eurythmia  of  which  those  Mediterraneans 
par  excellence,  the  old  Greeks,  made  a  virtue.  The 
young  man  had  said  to  himself,  "  Cousin  Mathilde 
has  made  objections,  and  my  poor  Eeine  exaggerates 
them."  And  he  had  smiled  tenderly  at  this  idea 
of  the  childish  alarms  of  his  fiancee.  Why  should  he 
doubt  for  a  moment  of  final  success,  having  on  his 
side  Reine's  love,  first  and  above  all,  and  then  Le 
Prieux's  sympathy,  of  which  he  was  sure,  and,  lastly, 


200  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

ties  of  kindred  with  Mine.  Le  Prieux,  which  would  ren- 
der impossible  any  very  serious  objections  from  her? 
Though  Charles  was  a  fellow  of  unusual  native  intelli- 
gence, as  was  indicated  by  the  unconscious  distinc- 
tion of  his  manners,  the  extreme  refinement  of  his 
features,  his  quiet  smile,  the  vivacity  and  gentleness 
of  his  black  eyes,  great  Arab  eyes,  in  a  brown,  almost 
amber-tinted  face  —  all  these  signs  of  the  nervous  tem- 
perament and  of  instinctive  shrewdness  did  not  pre- 
vent him  from  having  kept,  all  through  his  four  years 
of  the  Latin  Quarter,  a  rustic  way  of  regarding  certain 
Parisian  things.  For  instance,  the  true  position  of 
his  cousins  Le  Prieux  escaped  him  completely.  He 
regarded  them  as  rich,  sharing  in  the  common  opinion  as 
to  the  enormous  earnings  of  newspaper  men ;  but  it  had 
never  occurred  to  him  to  think  what  would  or  would 
not  be  Reine's  dowry,  or  whether  she  would  have  any. 
Himself  an  only  son,  and  secure  of  a  liberal  indepen- 
dence, if  he  should  decide  to  live  on  the  paternal 
domain,  —  in  that  fair  land  of  vineyards  and  olive 
trees  which  lies  along  the  bay  of  Fos,  a  few  leagues 
from  Martigues,  —  it  never  occurred  to  him  that  money 
had  any  more  to  do  with  this  marriage  than  it  had 
had  to  do  with  his  affection.  Neither  had  he  reflected 
upon  the  anomalies  that  a  young  Parisian  would  have 
discerned  in  the  social  position  of  his  cousin's  parents. 
"  Society "  seemed  to  him,  as  it  does  to  most  young 
men  of  his  class,  indefinite  and  undefinable,  a  kind  of 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  201 

vague  territory,  in  which  people  who  were  seeking  "to 
get  on  "  —  of  whom  he  was  not  one  —  gave  themselves 
up  to  clever  intrigues,  matrimonial  and  other,  while 
simple-minded  persons,  like  himself,  were  frightfully- 
bored  with  duties  at  once  frivolous  and  necessary,  when 
by  any  chance  they  were  obliged  to  be  connected  with 
it.  To  Charles  Huguenin,  M.  and  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
were  people  in  society,  as  his  own  parents  were  coun- 
try landowners,  by  some  original  conformation  which 
he  accepted  as  a  fact  without  attempting  to  understand 
either  its  conditions  or  its  causes.  It  was  so;  and 
that  was  all  there  was  to  it. 

With  this  turn  of  mind  and  these  ideas,  could  he  even 
suspect  the  realities  against  which  Reine  had  struggled 
since  the  previous  morning,  and  the  motives  of  the  unex- 
pected decision  she  came  to  announce  to  him  ?  Poor, 
romantic  Eeine,  who  little  dreamed,  herself,  what  inter- 
pretation she  risked  by  this  step,  which  would  be  so 
completely  inexplicable  to  the  young  man!  But  they 
had  met,  and  Charles  had  stammered — awkwardly 
enough,  be  it  said  to  his  honour  —  a  few  words  des- 
tined to  show  to  the  chaperon  his  amazement  at  an 
unexpected  meeting,  interrupted  by  E-eine,  both  to  spare 
him  the  little  falsehood,  and  to  save  her  companion  from 
the  embarrassment  of  a  false  position. 

"  No,  no,  cousin,"  the  girl  said,  "  Mademoiselle  Fanny 
knows  that  I  asked  you  to  be  here.  She  loves  and 
esteems  me  enough  to  be  sure  that  the  reason  why  I 


2l02  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

wished  to  meet  you,  was  because  I  must.     You  had  faith 
in  me,  Fanny  ?  " 

"  Oh,  yes,"  was  the  reply,  and  stopping  short  Mile, 
Perrin  made  a  sign  to  the  cousins  to  go  forward.  The 
humble  old  woman  had  expressed  so  much  serious  feel- 
ing, so  much  dignity,  in  this  gesture  —  which  might  have 
been  so  servile  —  and  the  seriousness  of  Reine's  voice 
had  been  so  solemn,  that  Charles  became  aware  that  he 
had  not  read  between  the  lines  in  the  despatch  that 
he  had  received :  this  appointment,  which  had  seemed  to 
him  natural  enough,  after  their  secret  betrothal,  was 
of  exceptional  gravity.  His  mobile  face  ceased  to 
express  its  gay  tenderness  of  the  moment  earlier,  and 
he  said, — 

"  "Why,  what  is  happening,  cousin  ?  You  seem  so  dis- 
turbed, so  agitated.  You  said  you  were  obliged  to  have 
this  interview  with  me,  as  though  it  were  painful  to  you. 
But  our  last  conversation,  and  my  mother's  letter  — " 

"  Has  your  mother  written  the  letter  ? "  Reine  inter- 
rupted, with  an  eagerness  that  disconcerted  Charles. 

"  But  why  do  you  ask  me  in  such  a  strange  way  ?  "  he 
said.  "  Ah,  Eeine  !  have  you  forgotten  all  that  we  said 
to  each  other  that  evening,  and  what  you  allowed  me 
to  hope  ?  Could  you  doubt  that  I  kept  my  promise,  and 
at  once  ?  I  wrote  to  my  mother  that  very  night,  and 
she.  replied  by  return  post  with  what  joy  she  would  have 
you  for  a  daughter,  and  with  what  affection  for  yourself 
—  you  will  be  touched  by  it !     Her  letter  to  your  mother 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  203 

was  sent  by  the  same  post.  It  must  have  reached  your 
house  Monday  morning  at  the  latest.  When  I  received 
your  despatch,  I  supposed  that  Mme.  Le  Prieux  was 
making  some  objection,  and  you  wanted  to  tell  me  about 
it.     But,  Eeine,  you  are  ill !     What  is  it  ?  " 

While  he  was  speaking  Reine  had  grown  deadly  pale. 
It  was  a  pang  of  singular  sharpness  that  she  had  felt 
in  suddenly  learning  that  her  mother  had  received  this 
letter,  asking  for  her  hand.  And  this  mother  had  said 
no  word  of  it  to  her  —  had  not  given  her  the  liberty 
of  choosing  between  happiness  and  self-sacrifice  !  Mme. 
Le  Prieux's  hardness  of  heart,  from  which  she  had  so 
often  suffered  and  been  unwilling  to  acknowledge  it 
even  to  herself,  was  once  more  evinced,  and  with  it  — 
even  worse !  —  came  the  evidence  of  her  mother's  du- 
plicity. She  controlled  herself,  however,  and  passing 
quickly  over  this  point  of  danger,  "I  am  not  very 
well  this  morning,"  she  said,  "  and  it  agitated  me 
when  you  spoke  of  Mme.  Huguenin's  joy  and  her  kind 
feeling  toward  me."  Then,  beseeching  and  resolute  at 
once,  she  continued,  "Listen  to  me,  Charles;  do  you 
believe  me  capable  of  falsehood  ?  " 

"  You  ?  "  he  said,  more  astonished  yet.  "  I  know  that 
I  have  never  heard  you  say  a  word  that  was  not  truth 
itself." 

"Ah!  thank  you,"  she  answered;  "say  it  to  me  again. 
It  does  me  so  much  good.  Tell  me  once  more  that  you 
believe  in  me,  and  that  you  always  will  believe  in  me." 


204  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

"  I  believe  in  you,  I  always  will  believe  in  you," 
the  young  man  repeated  with  docility;  then,  suddenly 
rendered  anxious  by  Eeine's  evident  excitement,  he 
asked,  "  But  why  ?  " 

"  Why  ?  "  she  said,  "  because  I  need  to  feel  that  you, 
you  also,  have  faith  in  me ;  or  else  I  could  not  have  the 
strength  to  speak  to  you  as  I  must.  Yes,  I  must  do  it," 
she  repeated,  and,  as  if  plucking  the  sentences  out  of  the 
depths  of  her  heart,  "  Listen,  Charles.  I  made  this  ap- 
pointment with  you  this  morning  at  the  risk  of  having 
you  think  ill  of  me,  because  I  was  not  willing  to  have  you 
hear  from  any  one  but  myself  a  thing  which  will  not 
grieve  you  any  more  than  it  grieves  me,  I  swear  to  you! 

"  Cousin,  let  me  finish,"  she  went  on,  as  Charles  was 
about  to  speak  ;  "  it  was  my  wish  to  tell  you  this  thing 
myself,  so  that  I  could  also  say  that  to  you,  and  could 
ask  you  to  feel  sure  that  I  did  not  deceive  you  the 
other  night  in  letting  you  see  that  I  shared  your  feel- 
ing. Yes,  Charles,  to  bear  your  name,  to  devote  my 
life  to  you,  to  be  your  wife,  to  live  there  with  you  in 
Provence,  would  be  happiness  to  me.  I  ask  you  to 
believe  this,"  and  in  repeating  yet  again  this  word 
"believe,"  her  voice  became  still  more  intense,  as  if 
she  hoped  to  communicate  to  the  young  man  who  lis- 
tened to  her,  and  had  now  himself  grown  very  pale, 
the  fervour  of  renunciation  which  possessed  her.  "  And 
I  ask  you  again  to  believe  me  when  I  tell  you  that  I 
must  renounce  this  happiness,  and  for  a  reason  which 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  205 

I  can  neither  escape  from  nor  reveal  to  you,  and  about 
which  you  must  not  question  me." 

Her  charming  face,  ordinarily  so  reserved,  so  closed 
by  the  delicate  modesty  of  her  own  feelings,  had  never 
shown  more  clearly  the  almost  wild  ardour  of  her 
deepest  aifections.  Never  had  those  soft  brown  eyes 
been  lighted  by  a  flame  more  intense,  and  the  smothered 
tones  which  came  into  her  voice  revealed  the  extreme 
emotion  of  her  heart,  whose  throbbing  Charles  could 
almost  detect  through  the  thick  jacket  that  she  wore. 
At  any  other  moment  he  would  have  pitied  this  evident 
distress,  but  he  was  himself  a  prey  to  surprise  too  cruel 
and  too  violent  to  think  of  anything  else;  and  when 
Eeine  ceased  speaking,  this  surprise  broke  out  in  a  cry 
of  almost  brutal  revolt. 

"  It  does  not  seem  possible  to  me  that  I  have  under- 
stood you  correctly,"  he  said.  "Let  me  think  for  a 
moment,"  and  he  passed  his  hand  over  his  forehead 
as  if  to  collect  his  thoughts.  "And  yet  it  is  true, 
I  am  not  dreaming.  You  are  here,  Reine,  and  you 
tell  me  that  now  you  will  not  marry  me  ? " 

"  That  now  I  cannot  marry  you,"  the  girl  interrupted 
him,  with  a  voice  so  feeble  that  her  cousin  scarcely 
heard  it,  so  carried  away  he  was  by  the  violence  of 
his  own  emotion. 

"  And  you  wish,"  he  went  on,  "  that  I  should  accept 
this  resolution,  without  even,  seeking  to  know  whence 
it  comes,  who  has  inspired  it,  why  you  have  changed  ?  " 


206  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

"I  have  not  changed,"  she  again  interposed. 

"You  tell  me  that  you  were  sincere  with  me  the 
other  evening,"  continued  the  wounded  lover,  without 
taking  any  notice  of  her  interruption,  "and  that  you 
feel  the  same  to-day  that  you  did  then.  If  this  is  true, 
what  is  the  matter,  then  ?  What  has  happened  ?  All  a 
man's  joy  in  life,  all  his  hope,  is  not  to  be  taken  away 
from  him  without  his  having  the  right  to  defend  that 
happiness  and  that  hope.  No,  Eeine,  it  is  not  possible ; 
for  you  to  speak  to  me  as  you  have  just  done,  after 
having  spoken  to  me  as  you  did  speak  on  Wednesday, 
something  must  have  happened,  I  tell  you  again,  some- 
thing very  serious.  But  what  —  mon  Dieu !  what  is  it  ? 
Is  your  father  opposed  to  this  marriage,  or  your  mother  ? 
No.  Since  they  have  not  told  you  that  mamma's  letter 
has  reached  them.  Or  perhaps  you,  yourself,  have  told 
them  ?     I  beg  you,  Heine,  to  tell  me  —  is  it  that  ?  " 

"  No,"  she  found  strength  to  say. 

"  Then,"  he  insisted,  "  if  the  obstacle  comes  neither 
from  your  father  nor  your  mother,  it  can  only  come 
from  yourself.  It  is,  then,  an  idea  of  your  own,  which 
has  led  you  to  change  your  decision.  There  is  nothing 
else  that  it  can  be."  And  if  the  innocent  Eeine  had  had 
some  knowledge  of  the  depths  of  njan's  heart,  she  would 
have  known  that  this  sentence  revealed  the  recoil  at  a 
certain  thought,  and  the  sudden  appearance  of  jealousy. 
"Well,  then,"  he  implored,  "whatever  this  idea  is,  tell 
it  to  me,  Reine.     I  believe  you.    I  believe  that  you  love 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  207 

me,  as  I  love  you.  It  is  not  a  matter  which  concerns 
my  happiness  alone,  but  yours  as  well.  Do  not  sacrifice 
it  to  a  chimera ;  for  this  cannot  be  a  real  thing,  I  am 
sure.  Tell  me  your  reason.  Let  us  talk  it  over.  If  it 
is  a  secret,  you  surely  know  that  I  can  keep  a  secret,  if 
it  concerns  you.  When  once  you  have  told  me,  you  will 
be  surprised  yourself  to  see  how  it  will  vanish.  Come, 
for  your  part,  have  confidence  in  me ;  speak  to  me  —  " 

"  Ah ! "  she  moaned,  in  a  tone  of  anguish  that  this 
time  struck  to  his  very  heart;  "if  I  could  have  told 
you,  should  I  not  have  done  it  at  once  ?  I  asked  you 
to  have  faith  in  me,"  she  continued,  joining  her  hands, 
which  trembled  as  she  spoke ;  "  I  hoped  from  you  that 
you  would  believe  in  me.  I  ask  you  again,  believe  me. 
Believe  that  if  I  came  to  tell  you  that  I  cannot  be  your 
wife,  it  is  because  I  cannot ;  and  that  if  I  do  not  tell  you 
the  reason,  it  is  because  neither  can  I  do  that.  No," 
she  repeated,  with  almost  savage  energy,  "  I  cannot ! " 

There  are,  in  conversations  like  these,  where  the  very 
depths  of  the  nature  are  involved,  moments  when  one 
will  or  the  other  asserts  itself  so  forcibly  that  the  dis- 
cussion stops  short.  When  Reine  had  thus  spoken  her 
last  "  I  cannot,"  Charles  felt  himself  in  the  presence  of 
the  unconquerable.  The  two  walked  on  a  few  steps 
silently :  she,  exhausted  by  the  energy  she  had  just  dis- 
played ;  he,  as  if  maddened  by  the  shock  of  having  flung 
himself  for  the  first  time  in  his  life  against  the  impene- 
trable in  a  woman's  heart  —  the  worst  of  tortures  in  love. 


208  OTHER    people's    LUXURY 

He  looked  at  lier  with  feelings  which  he  would  have  sworn 
he  could  never  feel  toward  her,  irritated  even  to  rancour. 
The  good  honest  fellow  had  never  dreamed  to  what 
irresistible  frenzies  the  sharp  sting  of  passion  drives  a 
man's  soul,  suddenly  maddened  by  the  excess  of  power- 
less grief.  He  looked  at  her,  and  the  girl's  soft  brown 
eyes,  the  ideal  nobleness  of  her  profile,  the  grace  of 
the  thin  cheek,  the  fine  lines  of  the  expressive  mouth 
with  its  slightly  full  lips,  the  supple  silk  of  her  chestnut 
hair,  her  slender  figure,  —  all  that  charm  of  youth  which 
usually  made  him  so  gentle  toward  her,  now  excited 
in  him  a  cruel  desire  to  break,  to  crush  her,  so  much 
did  her  invincible  resistance  exasperate  his  whole 
being. 

What  was  that  mysterious  motive,  powerful  enough 
to  make  this  fragile  creature,  whom  he  had  seen  so 
much  his  own,  so  touching  in  her  self-surrender,  sud- 
denly withdraw  herself  from  him  ?  At  the  first  moment 
he  had  thought  that  it  might  be  some  religious  scruple. 
Although  in  Heine's  equable,  well-balanced  nature  reli- 
gion had  never  gone  to  extremes,  who  could  tell  if  she  had 
not,  in  the  fervour  of  her  fifteenth  year,  made  some  vow 
which  she  had  suddenly  remembered.  But  no.  She 
would  not  have  had  that  evident  terror  as  to  confessing 
such  a  motive.  Charles  continued  to  look  at  her,  and 
the  same  frightful  suspicion  which  had  presented  itself 
before  and  been  repulsed,  besieged  him  anew:  "What 
if  she  loves  another  ?  "     It  was  an  insane  suspicion,  for 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  209 

she  had  just  told  him  the  contrary,  and  everything 
proved  her  veracity,  —  words,  voice,  and  look ;  an  out- 
rageous suspicion,  too,  for  if  Reine  loved  another  man, 
her  attitude  toward  her  cousin,  the  other  evening  at  the 
ball,  and  now,  was  the  vilest  of  coquetry ;  and  when  had 
she  given  him  the  right  to  believe  her  even  capable  of 
a  wrong  feeling  ?  Alas !  Insane  and  outrageous  ideas 
are  exactly  those  that  jealousy  awakens  in  us  the  most 
instinctively,  and  its  fatal  intoxication  prevents  us  from 
recognizing  either  their  madness  or  their  injustice.  Let 
this  be  the  excuse  of  Charles  Huguenin  for  having, 
though  but  for  an  hour,  been  unjust  toward  the  adorable 
child  who  walked  at  his  side  along  the  terrace  on  the 
water's  edge.  The  frosty  gravel  creaked  under  their 
feet ;  the  whistle  from  the  tug-boats  came  to  them  over 
the  banks  of  the  Seine,  very  near  and  green  between 
its  quays  of  stone ;  and  these  sounds  appeared  not  more 
foreign  to  himself  than  did  the  sound  of  the  words  that 
his  own  lips  now  uttered.  Was  it  really  he  who  was 
speaking  thus,  and  to  Reine,  to  his  dear  Reine,  sur- 
rounded till  that  moment  by  a  love  respectful  as  a  cult, 
idolatrous  as  devotion? 

"Very  well,"  he  had  begun,  "I  shall  respect  your 
wish.  I  shall  not  seek  to  know  the  motive  that 
causes  you  to  break  my  heart.  There  is,  however, 
one  question  that  I  have  a  right  to  ask  you,  and  to 
which  you  owe  me  a  reply.  Tell  me  that  you  do  not 
recall  your  promise    because   you   wish    to   marry   an- 


210  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

other  man.  Tell  me  this,  and  I  will  submit.  I 
shall  leave  Paris  to-night,  and  you  will  never  hear  of 
me  again.     But  tell  me.     I  wish  to  know." 

He  saw  that  she  grew  pale  and  trembled  more  than 
ever,  but  she  remained  silent,  and,  his  frenzy  increas- 
ing by  what  he  conjectured  lay  behind  her  silence,  he 
went  on  in  a  still  more  harsh,  rough  tone :  — 

"  It  is  true,  then,  since  you  dare  not  say  no  ?  It  is 
true?" 

"I  cannot  answer  you,"  she  said,  in  a  voice  that 
was  scarcely  more  than  a  breath,  so  stifled  she  was 
with  emotion. 

"  Not  to  reply  is  replying,"  he  said.  "  And  so  you 
are  going  to  marry  some  one  else !  "  he  repeated,  "  some 
one  else."  Then,  all  the  rage  of  jealousy  blazed  in  his 
eyes,  and  no  longer  measuring  his  words,  he  went 
on :  "  But  this  is  infamous,  this,  that  you  have  done ! 
It  is  an  outrage !  Have  I  deserved  being  treated 
like  this?  The  other  evening  it  was  so  easy  to  do 
—  when  I  spoke  to  you,  why  did  you  not  stop  me  at 
once?  And  before  that,  you  knew  well  enough  that 
I  loved  you!  Why  did  you  let  me  believe  that  you 
felt  the  same  toward  me  ?  Why  do  you  come  here 
trying  to  make  me  believe  it  still  ?  Ah !  it  is  abomi- 
nable!    It  is  abominable!" 

"  Charles,"  she  interrupted,  imploring,  "  stop !  you 
hurt  me  too  much.  Have  pity  —  you  do  not  know. 
You  promised  to  believe  in  me." 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  211 

"  Ah  1 "  he  said,  "  how  do  you  expect  me  to  believe 
in  you  now  ?  " 

"  You  no  longer  believe  in  me  ?  "  she  said,  stopping, 
as  if  she  could  not  take  another  step. 

"No,"  he  said  brutally.  He  had  no  sooner  flung 
at  her  this  terrible  monosyllable  than  remorse  for 
his  blasphemy  entered  his  soul,  when  he  saw  the 
change  that  came  in  her  face.  Her  eyelids  quivered, 
her  lips  parted  as  if  gasping  for  breath,  and  she 
leaned  against  a  tree  like  a  person  about  to  fall. 
He  approached  to  offer  her  support,  but  she  repulsed 
him  with  a  gesture.  The  colour  came  back  to  her 
face.  She  opened  her  eyes  again,  and  the  indigna- 
tion of  her  despised  sincerity  shone  in  her  beautiful 
glance,  which  fixed  itself  upon  him  with  a  strange 
intensity.  Then,  instead  of  speaking,  she  turned  away 
abruptly,  and  began  running  —  like  a  person  who  seeks 
to  escape  from  some  intolerable  thing  —  toward  Mile. 
Perrin,  who  was  not  far  off;  and  she  called  to  her, 
in  a  voice  which  had  regained  its  firmness,  "Fanny, 
Fanny !  Come !  We  must  go.  We  have  only  just 
time  to  get  home." 

The  young  man  made  no  attempt  to  speak  to  her 
again;  he  made  no  attempt  to  detain  her,  or  to  fol- 
low her.  He  did  not  even  take  leave  of  the  two 
women.  Eeine  and  her  companion  had  already  turned 
the  corner  of  the  Orangery,  while  he  still  stood  near 
the  tree  against  which  the  young  girl  had  leaned,  as 


212  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

if  he  were  hypnotized  by  the  horror  of  what  had 
just  occurred.  He  heard  the  barking  of  the  collies, 
who  had  gone  off  in  another  direction  with  their 
mistress  and  were  now  returning.  He  saw,  through 
the  bare  branches  of  the  trees,  the  skaters  going  and 
coming  upon  the  icy  basin,  the  gray  statues  relieved 
against  the  sky,  the  place  de  la  Concorde  undulating 
with  carriages,  the  obelisk  lifting  its  pink  shaft  be- 
tween the  fountains  with  the  divinities  on  each  side 
cuirassed  in  glittering  ice,  —  and  the  dark  figure  of 
Eeine  going  away,  farther  and  farther.  All  these 
details  of  the  scene  in  which  he  and  his  cousin  had 
parted  were  very  real  and  true.  The  truth  of  the 
words  they  had  exchanged  became  very  real  also  to 
Mm,  especially  those  that  he  had  himself  spoken; 
and  when  Eeine  had  finally  disappeared  from  his 
sight,  he  sat  down  upon  a  bench:  "Wretch  that  T 
am ! "  he  groaned,  "  she  will  never  forgive  me." 
He  no  longer  doubted  her.     And  this  was  worse ! 

VII 

REVELATIONS 

Charles  Hugitenin  was  not  deceived  by  his  own 
remorse;  his  cousin's  abrupt  departure  was  not  the 
indication  of  one  of  those  lovers'  quarrels  which  will 
be  followed  by  a  happy  reconciliation  when  next  they 
meet.     No;   the    feeling   excited    in  Eeine's  heart  by 


OTHER   people's  LUXURY  213 

her  cousin's  lack  of  confidence  in  her  was  of  the 
kind  that  drives  a  young  heart  to  the  most  desperate 
extremes.  It  is  the  charm  and  it  is  the  danger  of 
emotions  in  the  very  young  when  first  they  meet  the 
shock  of  life,  that  their  entire  character  predisposes 
them  to  uncompromising  decisions,  too  easily  irrevo- 
cable. The  same  lack  of  experience  which  gives  them 
their  fervour  of  aspiration  toward  the  ideal,  incapaci- 
tates them  from  forming  a  correct  estimate  of  the  impor- 
tance of  their  first  disillusions  in  the  impulse  toward 
happiness.  They  dream  of  an  absolute  in  the  emotions, 
which  is  not  of  this  world,  and  to  perceive  this  fills 
them  with  despair.  Eeine  went  to  meet  her  cousin, 
her  heart  lifted  up,  it  will  be  remembered,  with  the 
thought  that  she  could,  by  appealing  to  his  affection, 
perform  what  she  considered  to  be  her  imperative 
duty  as  a  daughter,  remain  silent  as  to  her  motives, 
and  still  not  be  misunderstood.  The  result  was  that 
Charles  had  told  her  that  he  did  not  believe  in  her. 
The  only  consolation  that  she  could  have  in  her 
mortal  sacrifice  was  taken  from  her  at  once.  At 
the  same  time,  she  seemed  to  herself  to  have  dis- 
covered in  the  man  whom  she  loved,  a  some  one  whom 
she  did  not  know,  and  whom  she  regarded  with  terror. 
What  a  look  of  hatred  she  had  surprised  in  his  eyes, 
what  a  cruel  agitation  upon  his  lips,  what  a  savage  tone 
in  his  voice !  And  what  completed  her  desperation 
even  more  than  this   disappointment  and  this  terror, 


214  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

was  her  indignant  revolt  against  so  harsh  injustice. 
This  thrill  of  revolt  increased  within  her  as  she  re- 
flected, while  she  walked  on  beside  the  gentle  Fanny 
Perrin,  and  her  step  grew  more  rapid  and  more  excited, 
as  if  fleeing  in  all  haste  from  that  terrace  where  she 
had  heard  those  words  whose  unjust  brutality  pursued 
her,  that  "no,"  which  had  struck  her  to  the  heart, 
and  rankled  like  an  arrow  broken  in  the  wound.  She 
went  on,  blinded  by  the  intolerable  grief  of  this  thought : 
"  He  does  not  believe  in  me ! "  and  saw  neither  the 
streets  nor  the  passers-by,  nor  yet  her  quiet  companion, 
who  dared  not  speak  to  her;  and  it  was  like  the 
awakening  from  a  trance  of  somnambulism,  when  in 
the  squai'e  Delaborde,  as  they  were  about  to  enter  the 
rue  du  G^neral-Foy,  the  timid  Fanny  at  last  decided 
to  speak  to  her. 

"  I  do  not  ask  you  any  question,  Eeine ;  I  have  not 
the  right ;  and  still,  before  we  separate,  I  want  to  beg 
two  things  of  you.  I  have  proved  my  love  for  you 
and  my  esteem,  have  I  not?" 

"  Dear  Fanny  ! "  said  the  girl,  and  grasped  her  friend's 
hand  with  a  gratitude  that  emboldened  the  other  to 
continue. 

"Since  you  feel  this,  you  must  be  very,  very  sure 
that  I  speak  to  you  for  your  own  interest,  as  far  as 
I  understand  it.  Even  before  to-day,  you  know,  I 
knew  many  things.  My  first  request  is,  that  you 
promise  me  to  wait  a  little  before  you  decide  about 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  215 

this  marriage  that  they  want  you  to  agree  to.  The 
second  —  " 

"Well,  the  second?"  Eeine  insisted,  as  Fanny  hesi- 
tated. 

"  The  second  is,"  said  the  other,  with  crimsoning 
cheeks,  "not  to  be  unjust  to  your  cousin." 

They  had  reached  the  door  of  the  house  where  the 
Le  Prieux  lived  before  Reine  had  made  any  reply  to 
either  the  one  or  the  other  of  her  humble  friend's 
entreaties.  When  they  were  on  the  landing  of  the 
stairs,  and  Reine  was  about  to  ring  the  bell,  she  said,  in 
a  voice  whose  tremor  betrayed  her  inward  disturbance,  — 

"  Pardon  me,  Fanny,  for  not  answering  you  sooner. 
As  to  your  first  request,  I  can  make  no  promise.  As 
to  the  second,  you  have  no  idea  how  mistaken  you  are 
in  regard  to  me  and  — "  She  had  her  cousin's  name 
upon  her  quivering  lips,  but  she  could  not  bring  her- 
self to  utter  it.  "No,"  she  insisted,  "it  is  not  I  who 
am  unjust."  And  she  repeated,  "  It  is  not  I."  Then, 
with  a  sign  to  Fanny  that  she  must  say  no  more,  and 
her  finger  pressing  the  bell,  she  added,  "I  thank  you 
for  what  you  have  done  for  me;"  and  as  the  door 
opened,  kissed  Mile.  Perrin,  saying  in  a  low  voice,  but 
in  a  tone  that  indicated  determined  resolution,  "  Adieu. 
You  must  leave  me.     That  will  be  for  the  best." 

One  last  look  to  repeat  again,  with  thanks  for  so 
much  affection  shown,  the  final  entreaty  to  be  left  to 
her  fate,   and  Eeine   disappeared    into    the    anteroom. 


216  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

The  door  was  closed,  and  Fanny  Perrin  began  to 
descend  the  sumptuous  staircase  —  a  quiet  staircase 
with  balusters  of  carved  wood,  with  windows,  with 
plants  in  pots,  a  red  carpet,  and  the  warm  breath 
everywhere  from  invisible  hot-air  pipes,  well  suited  to 
give  that  impression  of  a  private  house  which,  of 
necessity,  made  part  of  the  programme  of  the  "beau- 
tiful Mme.  Le  Prieux."  Ordinarily  these  trumpery 
splendours  deeply  impressed  the  poor  music  teacher, 
Avho  herself  felt,  in  her  way,  the  prestige  of  other 
people's  luxury.  But  at  this  moment,  entirely  absorbed 
in  the  scene  she  had  just  witnessed,  she  no  longer 
made  mental  comparisons  between  the  cold  flags  of  her 
sixth  floor  in  the  Batignolles,  and  the  soft  richness  of 
these  stairs  on  which  her  feet  usually  stepped  with  respect, 
almost  with  compunction.  She  was  saying  to  herself, 
"  To  whom  is  it  that  they  want  to  marry  Eeine  ? " 
In  her  thoughts  she  went  over  all  the  young  visitors 
of  the  salon  Le  Prieux  whom  she  knew  either  by 
Reine's  mention  of  them  or  by  having  met  them  her- 
self in  her  vocation  of  companion  or  music  teacher. 
The  image  of  Charles  came  before  her  mind,  among 
many  others,  and  finally  took  precedence  of  them  all. 
She  beheld  him  as  he  came  forward  to  meet  Keine  on 
the  terrace  by  the  river,  his  face  animated  and  radiant, 
his  eyes  full  of  light ;  and  then,  as  the  interview  was 
closing,  his  displeased  look,  his  hard  eyes,  his  threat- 
ening gesture,  and  she  argued, — 


OTHER   I'EOPLE's    LUXURY  217 

"  Separated  ?  These  two  handsome  young  creatures, 
so  well  suited  to  each  other !  They  love  each  other,  that 
is  evident.  If  only  M.  Le  Prieux  knew  how  his  daugh- 
ter feels.  He  is  so  kind.  Would  there  be  any  harm  in 
telling  him  the  truth  ?  " 

And  already  a  vague  scheme  began  to  take  shape  in 
the  mind  of  old  Fanny,  who  was  as  romantic,  notwith- 
standing her  ugliness,  as  Reine  herself  could  be  —  the 
insane  project  of  giving  a  warning  to  the  father.  Yes, 
what  if  she  should  go  and  tell  him  that,  in  preventing 
the  marriage  of  Charles  Huguenin  and  his  daughter, 
he  was  causing  unhappiness  to  the  latter,  would  it  be 
betraying  Reine's  confidence  ?  To  let  the  father  know  ? 
But  when  and  how  ?  All  women,  however  naive  they 
may  be,  and  however  unfeminine,  have  an  intuition  infal- 
lible as  instinct  when  it  is  a  question  of  a  love  affair. 
Mile.  Perrin  neither  knew  the  name  of  Edgard  Fauche- 
rot,  nor  had  she  any  idea  of  the  conversation  that  had 
taken  place  between  Reine  and  her  mother,  or  of 
the  letter  sent  by  Mme.  Huguenin.  She  knew  none 
of  the  secret  details  of  this  domestic  drama,  —  the 
ambitions  of  Mme.  Faucherot,  the  debts  of  Mme.  Le 
Prieux,  the  brokerage  of  Cruce.  Yet  she  divined,  to 
the  point  of  feeling  an  almost  insupportable  anxiety, 
that  not  only  the  days  but  the  hours,  and  even  the 
minutes,  were  numbered. 

And  it  was  only  too  true  that,  at  that  very  moment 
when,  standing  still  on  the  sidewalk,  she  looked  up  at 


218  OTHER    people's   LUXURY 

the  windows  with  their  little  Louis  Seize  panes,  an 
event  which  came  veiy  near  being  irrevocable  was 
taking  place  in  one  of  the  rooms  lighted  by  one  of 
those  windows  with  the  little  curtains  of  foulard  silk 
and  guipure;  and  this  room  was  that  very  same  bed- 
room of  Empire  style,  with  light  green  carpet  and  yel- 
low silk  hangings,  where,  the  day  before,  had  been 
made  known  to  Reine  the  cost  of  the  stage  setting  in 
which  her  youth  had  been  spent. 

As  soon  as  she  had  come  in  from  her  walk,  and 
without  even  going  to  her  own  room  to  take  off  her 
hat  and  jacket,  the  unhappy  child  had  inquired  for 
her  mother,  and  on  being  told  that  Madame  was  in 
her  own  room,  she  had  gone  thither  at  once.  She  had 
found  Mme.  Le  Prieux  seated  at  her  writing-table, 
dressed  for  the  afternoon's  expedition  —  they  were  to 
go  together  to  see  an  exhibition  at  a  club  —  and  occu- 
pied in  writing  letters.  She  wore  a  gown  of  heavy 
cloth  of  a  silvery  gray,  with  velvet  panels  embroidered 
with  great  flowers  of  the  same  shade  and  an  edge  of 
chinchilla.  The  perfect  fit  of  this  attire  gave  it,  so  to 
speak,  an  aspect  of  a  uniform,  a  parade  dress;  while, 
at  the  same  time,  the  order  and  complication  of  the 
objects  ranged  upon  her  writing-table  testified  to  the 
task  of  an  immense  correspondence,  —  that  of  a  woman 
who  had  never  committed  the  slightest  error  in  polite- 
ness. How  many  "expressions  of  her  sincere  sym- 
pathy," how  many   "cordial   felicitations,"  how  many 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  219 

"affectionate  compliments,"  she  had.  written  in  her 
big  handwriting,  so  hackneyed  in  its  lofty  aristo- 
cratic air,  and  upon  paper  all  of  the  correct  size  and 
tint!  At  the  bottom  of  how  many  answers  to  invita- 
tions had  she  put  that  Duret-Le  Priexcx,  which  had 
been  adopted  by  her  as  her  signature,  in  imitation  of 
the  etiquette  of  the  Faubourg-Saint-Germain,  which 
couples  the  wife's  title  to  the  husband's !  On  seeing 
her  mother  thus,  just  as  she  had  always  known  her, 
continuing  to  practise  the  smallest  rites  of  her  social 
rdle  with  the  automatic  strictness  of  a  smoothly  working 
machine,  and  without  the  least  suspicion  of  the  moral 
catastrophes  occurring  about  her,  Reine  again  had 
had  that  feeling  of  chill  at  her  heart  that  she  had  so 
often  experienced  before  —  and  all  the  more  severe 
this  time  because  she  now  knew  of  the  letter  which 
had  been  sent  by  Mme.  Huguenin.  But  what  was  this 
shiver  of  hurt  sensitiveness  in  comparison  with  the 
frightful  suffering  which  still  overwhelmed  her,  and 
had,  in  the  short  half  hour  between  the  Tuileries  and 
the  rue  du  General-Foy,  brought  on  nothing  less  than 
an  attack  of  hidden  insanity.  By  what  other  name 
could  be  called  that  frenzy  of  grief  which  had  led  her, 
in  that  thirty  minutes,  to  the  mad  resolution  —  sus- 
pected by  Fanny  Perrin  —  to  have  done,  at  once  and 
forever,  with  Charles,  who  could  be  so  unjust,  and  to 
place  between  herself  and  him  a  barrier  forever  impas- 
sable.     Everyday  language  has  its  familiar  expression. 


220  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

coups  de  Ute,  for  these  rash  acts  of  wilfulness  so  com- 
mon in  youth,  when,  the  violence  of  emotions  being 
more  intact  and  more  intense,  the  soul  is  thrown  oft' 
its  balance  completely  by  the  shock  of  certain  ob- 
stacles. And  too  often,  alas !  with  irreparable  damage. 
This  something  irreparable,  as  Eeine's  ill  luck  would 
have  it,  was  at  the  moment  within  her  reach.  It 
needed  only  that  instead  of  waiting  till  Saturday  as 
had  been  agreed  she  should  consent  at  once  to  the 
proposition  of  marriage  with  Edgard  Faucherot.  The 
special  characteristic  of  these  coups  de  Ute  is  the 
haste  with  which,  in  executing  them,  we  use  whatever 
energy  is  at  our  command  at  the  moment,  as  if  we 
were  not  sure  of  having  it  at  any  later  period.  And 
later,  indeed,  after  having  rallied  from  the  first  attack 
of  acute  suffering  and  indignation,  scarcely  would  Reine 
have  had  the  strength  to  say  the  words  which  she  now 
at  once  said  to  her  mother:  — 

"  Mamma,  I  have  reflected  seriously  upon  our  conver- 
sation of  yesterday,  and  I  can  give  you  my  answer  now. 
If  M.  Edgard  Faucherot  asks  my  hand  in  marriage,  I  will 
accept  him." 

As  she  spoke,  her  voice  was  abrupt  and,  so  to  speak, 
metallic,  her  eyes  glittered  painfully,  and  her  burning 
cheeks  completed  the  revelation  of  the  fever  within. 
All  these  signs,  and  the  sudden  change  in  so  serious  a 
resolution,  should  have  enlightened  Mme.  Le  Prieux, 
especially  because,  in  the  letter  of  Charles's  mother, 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  221 

she  miglit  have  read  between  the  lines  the  secret  of 
the  two  cousins'  romance.  But,  on  the  one  hand,  she 
was  too  convinced  that  she  was  securing  her  daughter's 
future  happiness,  to  feel  the  least  remorse ;  and,  on  the 
other  hand,  she  had  too  much  practical  sense  to  seek 
the  causes  of  a  consent  given  more  promptly  and  easily 
than  she  had  expected.  Was  it  not  wise  to  take  advan- 
tage of  this  favourable  disposition,  no  matter  whence  it 
came?  And  —  who  can  tell?  —  the  satisfaction  of  this 
woman  devoted  to  worldliness  was  so  intense,  at  the 
idea  of  the  social  advantage  represented  to  her  by  the 
Faucherot  marriage,  that  there  was  perhaps  something 
as  near  unselfishness  as  so  self-willed  a  creature  is 
capable  of  in  the  impulse  of  affection  with  which  she 
clasped  Keine  in  her  arms,  saying,  "  Ah,  my  child, 
I  expected  nothing  less  from  you;  and  I  want  to  say 
to  you,  now  that  you  have  decided  freely,  and  I  run 
no  risk  of  influencing  you,  you  could  do  nothing  which 
would  better  prove  to  me  how  much  you  love  me  — nor 
anything  more  sensible.  Some  day  you  will  bless  me 
for  having  proposed  this  marriage  to  you.  It  is  some- 
thing I  have  long  thought  of,  you  may  be  sure.  But 
let  us  go  and  tell  your  father.  Poor  dear  man,  how 
happy  he  will  be  also !  " 

And  taking  Reine  by  the  hand,  she  hurried  her  away 
to  the  journalist's  little  room,  where  he  was  just  then 
—  it  was  twelve  o'clock  —  numbering  the  pages  of  his 
third   and   last   article  for   the   morning.     The   tension 


222  OTHER  people's  luxury 

of  labour  had  wrinkled  his  brow,  and  swollen  his  red- 
dened eyelids,  and  accentuated  still  more  the  wearied 
droop  of  his  mouth.  Besides,  his  hair,  a  little  ruf&ed 
by  the  pressure  of  his  hands,  upon  which  he  had  rested 
his  head  while  reflecting,  showed  its  gray  more  plainly 
than  usual.  Thus,  taken  by  surprise,  this  hard-worked 
man  of  letters  looked  ten  years  older  than  he  was. 
Although  Reine  was,  at  the  moment,  in  that  half- 
insensible  condition  which  accompanies  the  carrying 
out  of  certain  resolutions  which  are  nothing  less  than 
moral  suicides,  this  forecast  of  her  father's  old  age 
touched  her  heart  very  deeply,  and  still  more  did  the 
look  with  which  that  father  received  the  announcement 
of  her  approaching  betrothal.  But  both  impressions 
had  the  one  effect  of  only  strengthening  her  in  her 
fatal  resolution. 

"  Mon  ami,''  Mathilde  had  said,  with  that  blending 
of  familiarity  and  solemnity  in  which  she  excelled, 
"I  present  to  you  the  future  Madame  Edgard  Fauche- 
rot ; "  and,  at  a  gesture  which  he  made,  "  Oh,  yes ! " 
she  said,  "  Reine  has  given  .me  her  answer.  She 
accepts ;  and,  from  the  moment  she  does  accept,  we  feel, 
she  feels,  that  it  is  only  right  at  once  to  notify  the 
good  friend  who  has  undertaken  this  embassy.  I  am 
going  to  write  to  Cruc^." 

"  She  accepts  ? "  the  father  had  said,  and  while  say- 
ing these  words,  in  a  voice  trembling  with  emotion,  he 
had  looked  at  Reine.     The  girl  saw  in  his  eyes  that 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  223 

indefinable  expression  of  astonishment  and  pity  that 
she  had  already  noticed  the  preceding  day,  and  that  had 
so  much  disturbed  her.  She  had  believed  that  it  ex- 
pressed remorse  for  the  sacrifice  asked  from  her.  She 
now  turned  her  eyes  away,  and,  in  his  own  mind,  the 
father  attributed  this  visible  embarrassment  of  his 
daughter  to  a  kind  of  shame.  Knowing  nothing  of  the 
conversation  that  the  mother  and  daughter  had  had 
together,  why  should  he  not  believe  that  Reine  had 
consented  to  marry  a  rich  man  merely  because  he  was 
a  rich  man?  Something,  however,  protested  within 
him  against  a  supposition  which  contradicted  to  that 
degree  all  his  ideas  in  regard  to  her.  Then,  as  Mme. 
Le  Prieux  was  there,  radiant,  and  with  so  imperative 
an  authority  emanating  from  her,  scarcely  did  this  feeble 
man  find  courage  to  reply,  "But  is  she  very  sure  of 
having  reflected  sufficiently  ?  Tell  me,  Reine,  do  you 
not  need  to  think  about  it  longer?" 

"I  have  thought  about  it,"  Reine  said;  "I  have 
reflected." 

"Are  you  quite  sure  you  would  not  prefer  to  wait 
a  few  days  longer  ? "  he  urged. 

"I  offered  her  more  time,"  said  Mme.  Le  Prieux; 
and  she  continued,  turning  to  Reine,  "Your  father 
is  right.  We  should  both  feel  much  better  satisfied 
if  you  would  take  a  few  days  more."  The  clear- 
sighted woman  was  too  certain  of  her  daughter's  re- 
ply; the  girl  shook  her  head,  and  answered  firmly, — 


224  OTHER  people's  luxury 

"  What  is  the  use  ?  You  said  yourself,  mamma,  the 
sooner  the  better!" 

Never  did  father  and  child,  who  loved  each  other 
with  all  their  hearts,  exchange  so  cold  a  kiss  as  that 
with  which  Hector  Le  Prieux  and  Reine  sealed  this  kind 
of  compact,  ordinarily  so  touching,  when  a  daughter, 
sounded  in  respect  to  a  proposal  of  marriage,  replies 
to  her  parents  that  she  will  consent!  Never  was 
family  repast,  taken  in  circumstances  which  ought 
to  be  so  happy,  more  taciturn,  more  painful,  more 
weighted  with  an  indefinable  uneasiness  than  the  one 
which  followed.  Never,  through  all  the  years  in  which 
he  had  dragged  the  weight  of  his  crushed  ambitions, 
of  his  fallen  Ideal,  of  his  life's  failure,  did  the  jour- 
nalist feel  his  heart  more  heavy  than  when,  after  this 
gloomy  breakfast,  he  crossed  the  threshold  of  the  door 
of  his  house,  outside  of  which  was  already  in  waiting 
the  coupe  of  Mme.  Le  Prieux.  The  husband  was 
about  to  go,  either  on  foot  or  in  a  fiacre,  to  one  of  the 
innumerable  committees  on  charitable  fgtes  of  which 
his  wife's  acquaintances  were  perpetually  making  him 
president  or  member.  This  time  there  was  a  per- 
formance to  be  arranged  in  aid  of  the  victims  of  an 
earthquake  in  the  Ionian  Islands.  Ah !  at  moments 
—  and  these  moments  became  more  numerous  as  life 
advanced  —  how  incapable  the  envied  husband  of 
the  "beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux,"  the  chronicler  whose 
appointments  other  men   desired,   the   servile   producer 


OTHEK   people's   LUXURY  225 

of  copy,  felt  himself  of  pitying  any  other  misfortunes 
than  his  own,  so  lamentable  a  failure  did  his  life 
appear  to  him !  As  a  rule,  it  was  the  thought  of 
his  wife  and  child  that  restored  to  him  his  needed 
energy.  And  now,  to  think  of  them  was  a  strange 
grief  to  him.  One  of  the  two,  his  wife,  had,  since  their 
conversation  in  returning  from  the  theatre,  appeared 
to  him  as  so  unlike  the  image  that  he  wished  to 
have  of  her  —  and  that,  in  fact,  he  did  succeed  in  hav- 
ing!  He  succeeded,  but  —  like  all  who  love  and  will 
not  judge  the  person  beloved  —  he  did  this  by  an  effort 
of  which  he  was,  in  spite  of  everything,  conscious. 
He  had,  in  the  depths  of  his  soul,  a  dark  place  into  which 
he  never  looked.  Here  silently  were  accumulated  the 
proofs  of  Mathilde's  savage  egoism,  which  he  never 
acknowledged  to  himself,  while  yet  his  sensitive  af- 
fection took  account  of  them,  notwithstanding  this 
systematic  blindness.  Without  any  doubt,  he  loved 
her  as  ardently  as  ever.  She  was  always  to  his  eyes 
the  person  whom  he  had  seen  so  unhappy  after  the 
paternal  disaster,  the  fatherless  girl  upon  whom  he 
had  felt  he  could  never  sufficiently  lavish  the  compen- 
sation of  all  possible  prosperity,  elegance,  luxuiy,  and, 
if  it  had  been  in  his  power,  magnificence.  But  all 
the  indulgences,  all  the  kindnesses  of  this  passion, 
—  which  twenty  years  of  married  life  had  not  worn 
out,  —  did  not  prevent  his  having  suffered  cruelly  from 
the  horrible   faults   of   character   in  the   companion  of 


226  OTHER  people's  luxury 

his   life,   even   though    he   would  not   admit    them    to 
himself. 

For  the  first  time  in  these  twenty  years  this  recog- 
nition forced  itself  upon  him,  for  the  reason  that,  also 
for  the  first  time,  an  affection  equal  to  that  which  he 
bore  his  wife  came  into  play.  That  which  the  hus- 
band had  never  dared  on  his  own  account,  the  father 
would  dare  on  his  daughter's.  And,  indeed,  he  had 
already  dared.  His  wife,  Hector  had  never  judged. 
He  now  judged  the  mother  of  his  child.  From  the 
moment  when  Mathilde  had  mentioned  the  name  of 
Edgard  Faucherot  he  had  struggled  in  vain  against  this 
unquestionable  evidence :  no,  a  mother  who  loved  her 
daughter  would  have  no  such  marriage  as  that  for 
her  !  She  would  not  accept,  at  the  first  opportunity  and 
with  joy,  the  idea  of  giving  a  creature  like  Eeine,  a 
flower  in  refinement  and  innocence,  to  such  a  fellow 
as  this  Faucherot,  so  commonplace,  so  low  in  intelli- 
gence and  feeling,  simply  because  he  is  rich!  It  is 
true  that  Mme.  Le  Prieux  could  urge  in  her  defence 
the  consent  of  Reine  herself.  It  was  here  that  the 
father  asserted  himself,  and  spoke  more  loudly  than 
the  husband.  Although  the  consent  had  certainly 
been  given,  and  he  had  heard  Reine,  with  clear,  firm 
voice,  speak  the  fatal  words,  "  I  have  reflected,"  which 
excluded  all  idea  of  an  unfair  advantage  or  an  act 
of  tyranny,  something  within  him  protested,  and  would 
not  be  silenced.     His  relations  with  his  daughter,  from 


OTHER  people's  LUXURY  227 

her  earliest  infancy,  had  been  quite  different  from 
those  which  united  him  to  his  wife.  He  had  always 
felt  that  Eeine  was  entirely  transparent  to  him.  In 
thinking  of  her,  he  never  had  that  feeling  of  secret 
restraint  which  he  so  often  had  with  Mathilde.  The 
one  mysterious  point  in  his  daughter's  character  was 
only  too  clear  to  him.  That  which  he  had  read  in 
those  sweet  and  sad  brown  eyes  was  pity  for  his  toil- 
some life,  was  a  comprehension  of  his  hidden  griefs, 
was  a  regret  for  his  artist  ambitions  sacrificed;  and  it 
was  also  something  more.  That  something  more  he 
refused  to  read,  —  that  condemnation  of  the  mother's 
egoism,  —  and  yet  he  did  read  it  there,  nevertheless. 
That  a  young  heart  of  such  refined  susceptibility  and 
such  strength  of  affection  should  have  accepted  instantly 
the  idea  most  odious  to  a  girl  of  her  age  —  a  brutally 
mercenary  marriage,  entirely  unjustified  by  any  kind 
of  romantic  pretext  —  this  was  something  the  father 
could  not  believe.  He  detected,  behind  his  daugh- 
ter's submission,  an  enigma  whose  solution  escaped 
him.  He  had  an  idea  that  Mathilde  had  not  told  him 
the  whole  truth,  that  between  herself  and  Eeine  words 
had  passed  of  which  he  knew  nothing.  A  clandestine 
drama  was  going  on  in  his  house,  around  him,  whose 
plot  he  could  not  understand;  and  the  impression  was 
doubly  cruel  to  him.  In  the  first  place,  all  his 
Eeine's  future  happiness  was  involved.  And  then,  to 
admit   this   secret   drama  in   his  family  was  to  admit 


228  OTHER  people's  luxury 

the  duplicity  of  the  wife  and  the  cruelty  of  the 
mother.  And  with  that,  how  continue  to  maintain 
the  self-deceit  which  his  love  required  ? 

Such  were  the  thoughts  which  accompanied  Hector 
as  he  left  the  house,  and  began  going  down  by  the  left 
sidewalk  toward  the  church  of  Saint-Augustin,  when 
he  saw  emerge  from  the  rue  de  Lisbonne  and  hasten 
to  meet  him,  almost  running,  a  woman  in  whom  he 
recognized  with  amazement  the  usual  companion  of  his 
daughter's  walks,  none  other  than  Fanny  Perrin.  She 
had  been  lying  in  wait  there,  since  leaving  Reine, 
neither  quite  decided  to  go  up  again  to  the  apartment 
and  ask  for  M.  Le  Prieux,  nor  yet  to  go  away.  She 
had  let  the  minutes  pass,  forgetting  both  her  breakfast 
time  and  —  a  more  unusual  oversight  in  a  person  so 
pvmctual  and  so  poor  —  the  hour  for  a  music  lesson  she 
had  to  give  in  the  Batignolles.  She  awaited  M.  Le 
Prieux,  but  without  having  formed  any  precise  resolu- 
tion as  to  what  she  should  say  to  him.  But  she  waited, 
with  throbbing  heart  and  parched  throat,  as  if  con- 
strained by  some  force  outside  of  her  own  will,  with 
remorse  at  betraying  Reine's  confidence  if  she  spoke, 
and  yet  feeling  it  impossible  to  let  the  marriage  take 
place  of  which  the  young  girl  herself  had  told  her.  At 
least,  she  would  let  the  father  know  the  truth.  How  ? 
And  in  what  terms  ?  For  the  good  creature,  all  whose 
days  were  passed  in  such  calm  monotony,  amid  occupa- 
tions so  limited   and   so  regular,  these  last   few  hours 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  229 

contained  more  events  than  she  had  ever  experienced 
before  in  her  whole  life.  She  had  consented  to  accom- 
pany one  of  her  pupils  to  a  rendezvous !  She  had  be- 
come the  depositary  of  a  secret  upon  which  depended  the 
destiny  of  this  pupil,  whom  she  loved  to  the  degree  of 
sacrificing  to  her  her  own  professional  conscience.  And 
this  secret  she  was  making  ready  to  reveal !  All  the 
coarse  features  of  her  simple  face  were  distorted  by 
emotion,  at  the  moment  when  she  accosted  Reine's 
father.  Her  thick  lips,  where  rested  ordinarily  the 
foolishly  amiable  smile  of  an  inferior  always  exposed 
to  rebuffs,  expressed  genuine  anguish;  and  her  words 
came  hurriedly,  almost  incoherently,  mingled  with 
phrases  which  betrayed  the  habits  of  speaking  that 
were  appropriate  to  her  humble  station,  and  imploring 
exclamations,  revealing  at  once  her  perturbation  of  mind, 
and  the  scruples  she  felt  at  her  own  lack  of  fidelity 
toward  Reine.  But  her  passionate  desire  to  save  the 
young  girl  outweighed  everything  else. 

"Monsieur  Le  Prieux,"  she  said,  "you  will  excuse 
the  liberty.  I  must  speak  to  you.  I  am  only  a  poor 
woman.  Monsieur  Le  Prieux,  and  I  know  that  this  is 
a  step  which  it  is  not  proper  for  me  to  take."  Then, 
as  if  to  ward  off  inquiries,  she  continued :  "  Do  not 
question  me.  I  could  not  answer  you.  I  ought  not. 
I  ought  not  to  be  here.  But  it  concerns  Mademoiselle 
Reine,  who  has  always  been  so  good  to  me.  There  is 
something  that  you  ought  to  know,  Monsieur  Le  Prieux, 


230  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

you  ought  to  know  it^^  she  repeated.  "If  Reine  is 
married  as  you  wish,  she  will  die  of  grief.  She  loves 
some  one.  Do  not  ask  me  who  it  is.  I  must  not  tell 
you.  But  do  not  compel  her  to  be  married  against  her 
heart.  I  tell  you  again  she  would  die  of  grief.  Ah ! 
inon  Dieu !  there  are  those  ladies  now  !  They  will  see 
me !  Monsieur  Le  Prieux,  never  let  Reine  know  that 
I  have  spoken  to  you  !     Never,  never ! " 

And  leaving  her  interlocutor  literally  paralyzed  with 
surprise  at  the  street  corner,  she  fled  through  the  rue 
de  Lisbonne,  never  turning  to  look  back,  like  a  person 
who  has  just  committed  a  crime.  She  had  noticed 
that  the  coupe  which  had  been  standing  motionless  was 
just  starting  from  under  the  porte-cochere  of  the  house, 
not  more  than  fifty  feet  away,  and  coming  toward 
them,  and  before  Reine's  father,  who  had  turned  to 
look  up  the  street  at  the  exclamation :  "  There  are 
those  ladies,  now ! "  had  entirely  recovered  his  wits, 
the  carriage  passed  him.  The  horse  was  going  slow. 
Le  Prieux  observed  that  the  coupe  was  empty  and 
called  out  an  inquiry  to  the  coachman,  who  stopped  to 
reply,  — 

"  The  ladies  are  going  out  in  half  an  hour.  Madame 
has  given  me  a  letter  to  carry  to  M.  Cruce." 

"  I  am  going  that  way  myself,"  Hector  said,  who,  as 
he  leaned  forward,  perceived  the  letter  in  the  letter-box 
of  the  carriage.  He  opened  the  door  and  took  it  out, 
saying  to  the  coachman,   "You  can  return  and  wait 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  231 

for  the  ladies.  And  say  to  madame  that  I  have  taken 
charge  of  the  letter." 

These  two  brief  scenes  —  the  appearing  of  Fanny 
Perrin,  her  words,  her  sudden  flight;  and  then  the 
arrival  of  the  carriage,  its  stop,  and  the  taking  of  the 
note  intended  for  Cruce  —  had  been  so  rapid,  one  had 
followed  the  other  so  unexpectedly,  that  Hector  Le 
Prieux  might  have  thought  he  had  been  dreaming,  if  he 
had  not  found  himself  standing  on  the  corner  of  the  rue 
de  Lisbonne  with  his  wife's  letter  in  his  hand.  In  taking 
it  from  the  coupe  as  he  had  done,  and  saying  to  the 
coachman  what  he  had  said,  he,  the  well-balanced  man 
par  excellence,  had  obeyed  the  most  violent  and  irrational 
of  impulses.  He  knew,  too,  what  this  envelope  con- 
tained, whose  address  he  looked  at  in  a  stupid  way :  — 

"A  Monsieur, 

Monsieur  Cruc4, 

96  Rue  de  La  Boetie." 

and  beneath:  "A  porter,  press4e"  Mathilde  had  left 
the  breakfast  table  to  write  this  note,  with  his  appro- 
bation. Why,  then,  had  he  intercepted  it  ?  Why  was 
he  now,  with  hasty  steps,  walking  through  the  rue  de 
Lisbonne,  and  then  along  the  boulevard  Malesherbes, 
in  the  hope  that  Fanny  Perrin  might  have  waited  for 
him,  that  she  would  reappear,  and  talk  with  him 
further?  What  had  she,  however,  to  tell  him  that 
he   did   not  already  know?      The  few  words  she  had 


232  OTHER  people's  luxury 

said  corresponded  too  closely  to  his  own  feelings, 
their  tone  was  too  evidently  sincere,  for  him  to  have 
any  doubt  as  to  their  truth.  As  to  the  name,  which 
old  Fanny  had  declared  she  would  never  reveal,  had 
the  father  any  need  of  being  told  what  it  was  ?  As 
certainly  as  if  Fanny  Perrin  had  gone  to  the  very  end 
of  what  she  had  to  tell,  he  knew  that  the  young  man 
beloved  of  Reine  was  Charles  Huguenin.  But  all  pas- 
sions are  alike  in  this  twofold  and  contradictory  char- 
acter: a  certainty  of  intuition,  and  yet  an  eagerness, 
a  frenzy  to  hold  positive  proof  of  that  which  one  does 
not  in  the  least  doubt.  When  he  was  thoroughly  con- 
vinced that  the  music  teacher  would  not  return,  Hector 
hailed  a  fiacre,  and  gave  the  man  an  address  which 
was  neither  Grace's  nor  was  it  that  of  the  place  where 
the  committee  were  assembled  over  whom  he  was 
expected  to  preside.  He  would  go  to  the  rue  d'Assas, 
where  Charles  Huguenin  lived.  As  for  Mme.  Le 
Prieux's  letter,  he  had  torn  it  into  fifty  fragments,  al- 
most furiously,  and  the  wind  had  scattered  these  scraps 
of  perfumed  paper  under  the  feet  of  pedestrians,  under 
the  hoofs  of  horses,  in  dusty  corners  of  the  pavement, 
behind  the  carriage  in  which  Hector  was  seated,  a 
prey  to  the  most  violent  emotions  that  he  had  experi- 
enced for  years. 

"No,"  he  said  to  himself,  as  the  fiacre  went  on 
down  the  boulevard"  Haussmann,  through  the  rue 
Auber,  the  avenue  de  I'Opera,  the  place  du  Carrousel, 


OTHER   people's  LUXURY  233 

toward  the  Seine ;  "  no,  she  shall  not  be  married  against 
her  heart.  She  ■  shall  not  be  Mme.  Faucherot.  I  will 
not  have  it.  I  will  not  have  it!"  Against  whom  was 
this  most  intense  resistance  of  his  whole  being  directed 
in  this  outburst  of  resolution  ?  And  his  inward  mono- 
logue went  on,  one  idea  calling  out  another  with  that 
involuntary  logic  which  disconcerts  all  our  resolves  and 
sometimes  all  our  affections:  "I  knew  well  enough 
that  it  was  not  possible  that  she  would  accept  that 
Faucherot  if  she  were  not  forced  to  it.  Forced  ?  She 
believed  herself  forced.  But  by  whom  ?  And  by  what  ? 
We  left  her  free,  however.  Again,  just  now,  we  asked 
her  to  wait."  Against  what  idea  was  the  father  defend- 
ing himself,  as  he  repeated  that  mendacious  "  we "  ? 
"And  she  confides  her  feelings,  not  to  us,  but  to  a 
stranger.  Does  she  not  know  that  her  happiness  is 
our  sole  care,  that  we  live  only  for  her?  When  she 
was  to  go  and  talk  with  her  mother  about  this  pro- 
posed marriage,  I  spoke  to  her,  and  she  understood 
me.  At  least,  it  seemed  so.  I  remember  her  saying, 
*0h,  you  are  so  good  to  me,  and  I  love  you  so!' 
And  then,  this  silence,  this  distrust !  It  is  inconceiv- 
able. Perhaps  she  thought  that  the  person  who  wished 
to  marry  her  was  Charles,  and  finding  she  was  mis- 
taken, became  vexed,  perhaps  even  desperate.  She 
must  have  thought  that  her  cousin  did  not  love  her." 
And  then  he  sought  to  make  objections  himself.  "Is 
it  really  Charles  whom  she  loves?    I  will  know  about 


234  OTHER  people's  luxury 

that.  But  how?  I  should  have  done  better  to  find 
Mademoiselle  Perrin  and  make  her  tell  me,  to  wring 
from  her  the  whole  story.  What  if  it  is  not  he,  after 
all,  whom  Eeine  loves,  and  if  he  has  never  thought 
of  his  cousin  ?  In  any  case  she  shall  not  marry 
Edgard  Faucherot.     I  will  not  have  it ! " 

At  the  moment  when  Hector,  speaking  aloud,  repeated 
this  determination,  the  carriage  was  rolling  over  the 
pavement  of  that  long,  narrow  rue  des  Saints-Peres, 
one  of  the  rare  arteries  of  Paris  which  has  not  changed 
at  all  in  thirty  years,  except  at  the  point  where  the 
boulevard  Saint-Germain  is  cut  through  it.  The  jour- 
nalist's excessive  labour  rarely  permitting  him  to  go 
anywhere  for  his  own  pleasure  merely,  he  came  but 
seldom  into  this  part  of  the  city,  which  was  closely 
associated  with  the  far-off  memories  of  his  exodus 
from  Chevagnes  to  Paris.  At  that  time  he  had  taken 
lodgings  in  a  little  hotel  in  the  rue  des  Beaux-Arts 
—  0  simplicity  of  a  country  lad  pining  for  fame !  — 
because  of  the  name  of  the  street,  and  of  the  house, 
which  was  hStel  Michel- Ange.  By  what  subtle  trick 
of  his  overwrought  sensibility  did  the  aspect  of  this 
quarter,  where  he  had  cherished  the  disappointed 
ambitions  of  his  youth,  give  Reine's  father  an  irre- 
sistible desire  to  see  once  more  this  rue  des  Beaux- 
Arts,  very  close  at  hand,  it  is  true;  but  what  relation 
could  there  be  between  the  asylum  of  his  own  youth 
and  the  step  he  was  proposing  to  take,  to  save  from  a 


OTHER  people's  luxuby  235 

detested  marriage  the  youth  of  his  daughter?  Was 
it  that  he  wished,  suddenly  perceiving  the  extraordi- 
nary difficulties  of  this  step,  to  plan  its  details  more 
fully,  and  have  a  little  time  for  reflection  ?  Or, 
knowing  that  he  should  have  a  formidable  struggle  to 
go  through  with,  on  his  return  home,  did  he  go,  as 
if  driven  by  some  instinct,  to  seek  an  increase  of 
strength  from  the  vision  of  the  Le  Prieux  that  he 
once  was,  passionately  enamoured  of  art  and  of  the 
Ideal,  and  profoundly,  absolutely  a  stranger  to  the 
miseries  of  social  struggles  ?  More  simply  still,  had 
the  emotions  experienced  by  him  during  these  forty- 
eight  hours,  in  regard  to  his  daughter,  brought  into 
sharp  outlines  certain  ideas  which  he  had  so  long 
refused  to  acknowledge  to  himself,  and  did  an  irra- 
tional desire  get  the  mastery  of  him  to  ascertain 
whence  he  had  come,  where  he  now  stood,  and  why 
he  stood  there?  Certain  it  is  that,  reaching  the  rue 
Jacob,  he  knocked  on  the  window  of  the  carriage  and 
ordered  the  man  to  stop,  and  instead  of  going  on 
toward  the  rue  d'Assas,  he  got  out,  paid  his  fare,  and 
walked  in  the  direction  of  his  former  abode. 

He  was  at  one  of  those  singular  moments  when  the 
resemblance,  or  rather  the  identity,  of  one's  own 
destiny  and  the  destiny  of  those  from  whom  we  derive 
life,  or  who  derive  life  from  us,  awakens  in  the  depths 
of  one's  being  an  intense  and  almost  overpowering 
feeling  of   race.      Having    just  suffered  a  misfortune 


236  OTHER  people's  luxury 

which  one's  father  endured  in  like  circumstances,  or 
seeing  one's  child  about  to  receive  a  blow  that  oneself 
once  received,  the  profound  unity  of  blood  reveals 
itself,  and  strangely  disturbs  the  heart.  Directed 
toward  the  past,  toward  those  who  have  bequeathed 
to  us  their  virtues  and  their  weaknesses,  this  impression 
results  in  a  kind  of  almost  pious  melancholy  which 
pardons  all  the  faults,  and  is  grateful  for  all  the  bene- 
fits. Turning  toward  the  future,  toward  those  to 
whom  we  have  transmitted  that  family  soul  of  which 
we  are  but  a  moment,  this  impression  is  transformed 
into  a  profound  and  poignant  desire  to  lessen  for 
them,  to  spare  them,  if  we  can  do  it,  the  hereditary 
trials.  This  gives  one  those  indefinable  hours  —  hours 
in  which  he  does  not  know  if  it  is  himself  who  is 
concerned,  or  his  father,  or  his  child.  And  thus  in 
evoking,  along  the  sidewalks  of  those  old  Parisian 
streets,  and  before  the  unchanged  faqade  of  his  student 
abode,  the  images  of  his  remote  youth.  Hector  could 
not  have  told  whether  it  was  of  himself  or  of  his 
daughter  that  he  thought,  so  almost  unendurably  clear 
to  him  was  the  similarity  between  his  own  fate  and 
that  which  threatened  Reine.  What  else  did  it  say 
to  him  —  that  faqade  of  the  hotel  Michel- Ange,  before 
which  he  was  now  standing  motionless  —  but  that  there 
was  once  there,  in  one  of  the  rooms  of  that  cheap 
lodging-house,  the  second  on  the  fourth  floor  counting 
from  the  right,  a  youth,  sensitive  as  Reine,  capable,  like 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  237 

Reine,  of  the  most  subtle  and  exalted  feelings;  and, 
then,  that  this  young  man  had  been  unable  to  main- 
tain in  the  struggle  with  life  that  Ideal  of  art  which 
had  been  the  romance  of  his  youth,  as  Reine  at  the 
very  first  encounter  was  finding  herself  unable  to 
maintain  that  Ideal  of  love  which  was  the  romance 
of  her  youth.  What  element  of  weakness  was  con- 
cealed in  the  inmost  nature  of  them  both,  that  they 
should  be  at  once  so  refined  in  their  ways  of  feeling 
and  so  powerless  to  mould  their  existence  in  accordance 
with  their  hearts  ?  But  was  it  weakness  in  themselves  ? 
Was  it  not  merely  that  they  had  been  obliged  to  struggle 
against  a  stronger  will  than  theirs  ?  No,  the  young  man 
who  came  up  to  Paris,  to  conquer  fame  by  writing  mas- 
terpieces of  literature  under  the  eaves  of  the  poor  hotel 
Michel-Ange,  was  not  a  weakling.  He  was  simple- 
minded,  doubtless,  and  did  not  measure  the  appalling 
distance  that  separated  him  from  his  dream ;  but  Hector 
now  was  aware,  looking  back  across  the  years,  that 
this  youth  was  a  patient,  persistent  toiler,  and  would 
have  realized,  if  not  all,  at  least  a  part  of  that  dream, 
had  not —  And  a  woman's  figure  appeared,  whose 
black  eyes  darted  despotism,  whose  proud  mouth  was 
set  in  implacable  rule,  whose  beauty,  as  of  an  idol, 
commanded  homage.  Was  it  then  she  who  had  actu- 
ally made  him  fail  of  his  destiny?  Was  it  then  she 
whose  imperious  authority  was  constraining  Reine  to 
bend  also  before   her  wish  ?     This   double   vision  was 


238  OTHER  people's  luxury 

so  painful  to  the  disappointed  literary  man,  the  dis- 
tressed father,  that  he  repelled  it  with  all  the  strength 
of  his  old  and  ever  living  love  for  this  woman,  so  de- 
votedly obeyed  and  served  for  so  many  years;  and 
now  turning  his  steps  toward  the  rue  d'Assas,  he 
argued  with  himself:  — 

"The  fault  is  not  my  poor  Mathilde's.  How  could 
she  ever  know  that  I  desired  a  different  life?  Did  I 
ever  speak  of  it  to  her  ?  She  is  so  true,  so  upright, 
so  devoted !  She  believed  that  it  was  for  the  best, 
as  she  now  believes  that  the  Faucherot  marriage  will 
be  for  the  best.  The  fault  was  in  my  silence,  in  this 
timidity  that  has  always  prevented  me  from  letting 
even  her  see  me  in  the  complete  truth  of  my  aspira- 
tions. Reine  is  like  me  in  that  respect  also.  Even 
to  me,  she  has  not  said  that  there  was  some  one  whom 
she  loved.  When  we  talked  about  her  marriage,  the 
other  evening,  her  mother  and  I  —  if  I  had  only  known 
what  I  know  now!  But  I  knew  nothing  —  except  as 
a  matter  of  intuition.  I  must  have  positive  facts,  a 
confession.  Mathilde  would  be  the  first  one  to  give 
up  the  idea  of  this  marriage,  which  was  abhorrent  to 
me  by  instinct !  Mon  Dieu  !  I  hope  Charles  is  at  home ! 
But  is  it  Charles  whom  she  loves  ?  Why  not  ?  Of  all 
the  young  men  we  know,  he  is  the  only  one  who  de- 
serves her!  And  how  happy  they  would  be,  there  in 
Provence ! " 

Hector  had  now  just  reached  the  garden  of  the  Lux- 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  239 

embourg.  He  had  come  from  the  rue  des  Beaux-Arts, 
absorbed  in  thought,  and  mechanically  taken  the  route 
formerly  so  familiar  to  him  when,  unconsciously  home- 
sick for  the  oak  groves  of  Chevagnes,  he  had  been  wont 
to  seek  a  sensation  of  nature  in  looking  at  the  trees 
and  dreaming  in  the  Luxembourg  garden.  He  passed 
through  the  entrance  adjacent  to  the  gallery,  and  en- 
tered that  avenue  of  old  plane  trees  where  stands  the 
monument  of  the  pathetic  and  powerful  Eugene  Dela- 
croix. These  fine  trees,  his  early  favourites,  lifted  their 
enormous  bare  branches  against  the  icy  sky  of  the  after- 
noon. And  as  if,  at  contact  with  the  mute  witnesses  of 
his  youth,  the  poet,  dead  in  youth,  revived  within  him, 
the  journalist  began  to  think,  with  inexpressible  sadness, 
of  the  unbroken  flight  of  time,  this  succession  of  sum- 
mers and  winters,  of  leafage  upon  trees,  and  of  human 
lives.  Lines  of  Sainte-Beuve,  long  forgotten,  which  he 
had  formerly  loved,  came  to  his  memory  and  to  his 
lips :  — 

"  Simonide  Va  dit,  apres  V antique  Homere: 
Les  generations,  dans  leur  presse  ephemere, 
Sont  pareilles,  helas!  auxfeuilles  desforets 
Qui  verdissent  une  heure  etjaunissent  apres, 
Qu'enleve  VAquilon,  et  d'autres,  toutes  fratches, 
Les  remplacent  deja,  bientot  mortes  et  seches.  .  .  ." 

He  had  recited,  in  this  place,  this  divine  elegy  of  the 
least  appreciated  of  our  great  lyric  poets,  when  he  was 


240  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

himself  in  the  springtime  of  life,  in  that  age  of  fresh 
hopes  and  radiant  beginnings  where  now  Reine  and 
Charles  were,  —  age  so  brief,  hopes  so  quickly  vanished, 
beginnings  so  soon  ended !  At  least  it  must  not  be  that 
these  children,  through  any  fault  of  his,  should  lose, 
without  enjoying  them,  this  point  and  this  moment  of 
their  youth  and  their  love!  For  certainly  it  was  Charles 
whom  Reine  loved.  All  doubt  of  this  was  now  gone 
from  the  father's  mind.  He  remembered  the  young 
man's  look,  as  it  rested  upon  his  daughter;  Reine's 
excitement  when  her  cousin  was  coming;  countless  lit- 
tle signs,  which  he  had  summed  in  a  single  word,  when 
he  had  said  to  his  wife,  "  I  have  impressions." 

As  he  remembered  these  things,  the  blood  coursed 
through  his  veins  more  rapidly,  as  if  the  idea  of  these 
two  young  people's  love  for  each  other  had  brought  his 
own  youth  back  to  him.  He  resumed  his  walk  toward 
the  rue  d'Assas  with  an  alert  and  rapid  step,  and  his 
heart  beat  quickly  as  he  inquired  of  the  concierge  if 
M.  Huguenin  were  at  home.  He  was,  the  man  replied  ; 
and  the  father's  emotion  had  so  much  increased,  as  he 
went  up  the  stairs,  that  he  was  obliged  to  stop,  before 
the  door  on  which  was  fastened  with  four  tacks  the 
modest  card:  Charles  Huguenin,  Avocat  cb  la  Cour.  At 
last  he  has  rung  the  bell.  Steps  are  heard  within,  the 
door  opens.  Charles  appears,  and,  perceiving  who  it  is, 
leans  against  the  wall,  very  pale,  and  stammers,  with  an 
emotion  that  is  a  confession, — 


OTHEK  people's  LUXURY  241 

"  You,  Monsieur  Le  Prieux !  You !  Oh !  thank  you 
for  coming ! " 

The  words  "  thank  you  ! "  uttered  by  the  young  man, 
were  a  natural  sequence  of  the  thoughts  which  had 
followed  one  another  in  his  mind  since  his  cruel  con- 
versation with  Reine.  The  first  stress  of  despair  having 
abated,  there  had  come  to  him  the  renewed  energy  of  a 
love  which,  after  all,  knows  itself  to  be  shared.  He 
had  risen  to  his  feet,  saying  to  himself,  "I  love  her. 
She  loves  me.  I  cannot  lose  her  in  this  way ; "  and 
had  hastened  to  his  lodgings,  as  if  expecting  to  find 
some  word  from  Reine  awaiting  him.  A  mad  hope, 
which  proved  how  sure  he  was  of  his  cousin's  heart, 
strongly  as  he  had  declared  his  loss  of  faith  in  her ! 
But  there  was  no  letter.  The  disappointment  had  cost 
him  bitter  tears,  alone  in  his  little  student-lodging.  Then 
he  had  rallied  again  and  had  begun  to  reflect,  asking 
himself  what  steps  he  should  now  take.  The  passions, 
however  hot,  of  men  of  the  south  of  pure  race  are 
almost  always  accompanied  by  a  certain  lucidity  of 
mind  which  reminds  one  of  southern  skies,  all  light 
as  well  as  heat,  and  also  recalls  their  Latin  heredity. 
Charles  felt,  even  in  his  grief,  a  necessity  for  under- 
standing the  matter  clearly,  and  he  had  been  striving 
to  ascertain  in  the  present  situation  what  were  the 
unquestionable  facts.  The  first,  the  most  evident,  the 
one  to  which  he  had  clung  instantly,  as  we  have  seen, 
by  that  instinct  of  self-preservation  which  our  passions, 


242  OTHER  people's  luxury 

like  living  creatures,  have,  was  that  Eeine  loved  him. 
The  second,  and  not  less  evident,  was  that  some  obstacle 
had  arisen.  Charles  could  fix  this  as  having  occurred 
within  the  last  forty-eight  hours.  It  had  not  existed  at 
the  time  of  the  ball,  when  he  and  his  cousin  had  tacitly- 
become  engaged.  The  insane  frenzy  which,  two  hours 
before,  on  the  terrace  of  the  Tuileries,  had  wrung  from 
him  his  unjust  insult  to  Reine's  sincerity  had  passed 
away.  He  believed  that  she  had  been  sincere  in  pledg- 
ing herself  to  him,  and  sincere  also  in  begging  him, 
with  impassioned  entreaty,  that  he  would  not  seek  to 
divine  the  mysterious  hindrance  before  which  she 
trembled,  overcome  with  terror.  This  was  a  third  posi- 
tive fact.  And  a  fourth  was,  that  her  marriage  with 
another  man  was  under  consideration.  That  this  project 
had  very  recently  come  up  was,  still  further,  clear  to 
Charles.  In  any  other  case,  Eeine  at  the  ball  would  not 
have  been  toward  him  what  she  was.  That,  also,  her 
parents  were  intimately  connected  with  this  sudden 
project  of  marriage  Charles  inferred  from  this,  a  fifth 
fact:  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  not  spoken  to  her  daughter 
of  Mme.  Huguenin's  letter.  At  the  moment,  swept 
away  as  he  was  by  jealous  anger,  he  had  not  given 
to  this  singular  fact  its  extreme  importance.  He  now 
became  aware  that  this  silence  on  the  part  of  Eeine's 
mother  signified  a  very  matured  purpose  not  to  give 
the  young  girl  an  opportunity  to  choose  between  a 
marriage  with  her  cousin  and  this   other  marriage  — 


OTHER   PEOPLES   LUXURY  243 

with  whom  ?  And  supported  by  what  arguments  ? 
Here  Charles  could  go  no  further.  He  was  aware  that 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  found  means  to  convince  Reine 
by  terrorizing  her.  He  could  not  divine  reasons  which 
lay  deep  in  the  history  of  this  family  of  "the  non- 
classed  "  (to  employ  a  word  created  by  one  of  the  most 
generous  historians  of  difficult  life  in  Paris).  He  had 
turned  this  enigma  over  and  over  in  his  mind  during 
these  first  hours  of  passionate  reflection,  and  he  had 
only  discovered  in  this  mystery  still  another :  why  had 
not  Reine's  parents  had  at  least  the  charity  to  give  to 
him  an  explanation,  now  that  they  knew,  from  his 
mother's  letter,  both  his  feelings  and  his  hopes  ?  Thus 
far  he  had  gone  in  his  fruitless  analysis,  when  the  ring 
at  his  door  had  made  his  heart  leap  in  his  breast.  He 
had  opened  the  door  with  again  the  mad  hope  of  some 
word  from  Reine,  and  at  finding  himself  face  to  face 
with  Hector  Le  Prieux  had  cried  out  that  "  thank  you  ! " 
so  unintelligible  to  the  latter.  But  there  was  one  thing 
that  was  only  too  clear  to  the  father,  after  Mile.  Perrin's 
appeal  and  his  own  reflections  —  namely,  the  cause  of 
Charles's  evident  distress.  This  proof  of  the  young 
man's  affection  for  Reine  corresponded  so  well  to  Hec- 
tor's own  secret  wish  that  it  was  in  the  tenderest,  the 
most  indulgent  of  tones  that  he  spoke :  — 

"Oh,  come,  Charles!  cheer  up,"  he  said;  "take 
courage.  You  have  no  occasion  to  thank  me.  I  am 
only  doing  my  duty  as  a  father.     What  a  condition 


244  OTHER  people's  luxury 

you  are  in !  Ah  !  my  poor  boy ! "  For  Charles,  in 
his  amazement  at  these  words  and  the  manner  of 
speaking,  so  unexpected  by  him,  had  flung  himself 
into  the  arms  of  Le  Prieux,  sobbing  again,  and  re- 
peating, "  Oh,  yes !  thank  you,  cousin !  thank  you ! 
How  good  you  are !  how  good  you  are  ! "  The  father 
himself  was  deeply  moved  by  this  outburst  of  despair. 
But  he  was  too  much  concerned  to  learn  all  the  truth  as 
to  the  relations  of  the  two  young  people,  not  to  make 
an  effort  to  obtain  it  instantly.  He  had  drawn  Charles 
into  the  little  office  which  served  also  as  a  salon  for 
this  lawyer  without  clients,  still  uncertain  as  to  his 
definite  establishment,  —  a  charming  asylum  for  reve- 
ries, whither  Le  Prieux  had  come  but  once,  but  that 
visit  had  sufficed  to  win  the  journalist's  sympathy 
for  the  young  occupant  of  the  room,  such  an  atmos- 
phere of  thoughtful  and  romantic  youth  pervaded  it, 
—  with  the  worm-eaten  walnut  of  its  old  Provengal 
furniture;  with  its  choice  engravings  on  the  walls, 
each  representing  some  fine  edifice  of  Aries,  Nimes, 
or  Aigues-Mortes ;  the  well-arrayed  books,  evidently  well 
read,  in  the  bookcase,  and  the  papers  on  the  table ;  and 
the  trees  of  the  Luxembourg  beyond  the  little  balcony. 
He  seemed  to  himself  to  breathe,  as  it  were,  a  perfume 
of  the  poetry  of  his  native  soil,  preserved  in  Paris 
amid  all  contrary  temptations.  The  room  was  a  faith- 
ful image  of  the  little  moral  drama  that  had  been 
going  on  in  the  young  man's  heart,  divided  between 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  245 

nostalgia  for  his  home  iii  Provence  and  the  charm  of 
life  in  the  city;  and  it  was  this  aspect  of  the  things 
about  him  that  had  long  ago  given  Le  Prieux  the 
idea  that  Charles  would  be  the  husband  to  be  desired 
for  Reine.  Perhaps  there  was  a  recurrence  of  this 
now  distant  impression,  in  the  affectionate  persistence 
with  which  he  sought  to  make  the  young  man  confess 
all  the  secret  of  his  feelings. 

"  No,"  he  began,  "  it  is  not  goodness  in  me ;  and  once 
more  I  say,  you  have  no  cause  to  thank  me.  I  tell 
you  I  am  only  a  father  who  is  doing  his  duty.  But 
you  must  do  yours,  as  well,  and  respond  to  my  ad- 
vances with  absolute  sincerity.  Come,  speak  to  me 
freely,  frankly,  and  tell  me  all." 

"But,"  Charles  replied,  "what  can  I  say  that  has 
not  already  been  said  to  Madame  Le  Prieux  and  you, 
in  my  mother's  letter?  I  understood,  as  soon  as  I 
saw  you,  that  you  came  to  tell  me  again  what  I  already 
knew  from  Reine,  that  the  marriage  was  impossible.  I 
ought  to  have  known  it  sooner,  when  you  did  not  send 
for  me  on  the  receipt  of  my  mother's  letter.  And 
still.  Monsieur  Le  Prieux,  I  swear  to  you  that  I  would 
have  done  everything  to  make  Reine  happy;  I  would 
have  devoted  my  life  to  her.  I  am  not  a  person  of 
any  consequence,  I  know;  but  what  little  I  am,  I 
would  have  given  to  her  without  reserve;  and  my 
mother  has  also  told  you  in  her  letter,  I  am  sure, 
that  she  and  my  father  think  as  I  do." 


246  OTHER  people's  luxury 

If  the  revelation  of  Mme.  Le  Prieux's  silence  as  to 
the  steps  taken  by  Mine.  Huguenin  had  been  a  great 
shock  to  Reine,  who  knew  that  a  letter  was  to  be 
written,  what  a  blow  it  was  for  the  father,  in  no  way 
prepared  for  it!  In  the  flash  of  a  sudden  light,  he 
had  a  glimpse  of  the  truth.  Was  it  possible  his  wife 
could  have  been  so  lacking  in  frankness  toward  him, 
that  she  could  have  answered  him  the  other  evening 
as  she  did  answer  him,  if  this  letter  had  really  been 
sent  and  received?  Yes.  And  that  shade  of  anxiety 
in  her  manner,  as  she  said,  "You  have  been  ap- 
proached also  ? "  was  explained.  Besides,  the  young 
man's  tone  left  no  place  for  doubt,  and  Reine's  father 
understood  it  so  well  that  he  turned  his  eyes  away  to 
conceal  from  his  interlocutor  the  pain  that  he  felt 
at  this  discovery.  He  wished,  however,  to  make 
further  inquiries,  and  he  put  one  of  those  questions, 
aside  from  the  main  point,  which  a  person  will  put 
who  has  not  the  strength  to  express  his  entire 
thought. 

"You  say  that  Reine  told  you  that  some  difficulty 
had  suddenly  arisen  ?  She  knew,  then,  of  the  step 
your  mother  had  taken?" 

"Ah!  Monsieur  Le  Prieux,"  said  the  young  man, 
"  I  beg  you,  do  not  think  ill  of  her,  and  do  not  think 
ill  of  me.  My  cousin  has  no  reason  to  reproach  her- 
self, I  give  you  my  word.  I  had  never  spoken  to  her 
of   my   feelings,   never  —  until,   last  week,   it  is    true, 


OTHER   people's  LUXURY  247 

when  I  asked  her  what  her  answer  would  be  if  my 
mother  wrote  that  which  she  has  written  to  you.  I 
know  it  —  I  know  that  this  was  not  right.  I  ought 
to  have  addressed  myself  first  to  you  and  Madame  Le 
Prieux.  And  yet,  it  is  only  natural  that  I  could  not 
remain  in  uncertainty,  loving  her  as  I  do,  and  that 
I  tried  to  know  what  she  thought." 

"  Then  she  authorized  you   to  have  this   letter  writ- 
ten to  us  ?  "  the  father  said. 

"  I  understood  that  she  did  not  forbid  it." 
Le  Prieux  paused  a  moment  in  this  questioning, 
where  every  word,  throwing  a  cruel  light  upon  certain 
incidents  of  the  last  few  days,  deepened  the  darkness 
upon  others.  The  attitude  of  his  daughter  toward 
himself,  at  the  moment  when  she  left  him  to  go  to 
her  mother,  became  clear  to  him.  She  had  evidently 
believed  that  her  mother  had  sent  for  her  to  speak 
to  her  of  Mme.  Huguenin's  letter.  On  the  other  hand, 
what  had  passed  between  the  mother  and  daughter  was 
rendered  more  mysterious  than  ever  by  this  under- 
standing between  Reine  and  her  cousin.  How  and 
why  had  she  suddenly  changed  her  mind?  —  Then 
Reine  had  seen  her  cousin  in  the  meantime,  or  she 
had  written  to  him  ?  Having  just  discovered  in  his 
wife  such  a  lack  of  frankness  toward  himself,  Hector 
was  shocked  at  the  idea  that  his  daughter  could  have 
clandestine  interviews,  or  perhaps  maintain  a  secret 
correspondence.      This    thought   was    so   insupportable 


248  OTHER  people's  luxury 

to  him  that  he  grasped  the  young  man's  arm  violently, 
and  exclaimed, — 

"  Charles,  you  are  not  telling  me  the  whole  truth ! 
This  is  wrong.  No ;  it  is  not  the  whole  truth ! "  he 
insisted.  "Do  not  interrupt  me  again.  You  acknowl- 
edge that  you  and  Reine  had  an  understanding  in 
regard  to  your  mother's  letter  to  us.  Eeine  had  con- 
sented, then,  to  marry  you.  This  you  acknowledge. 
You  also  acknowledge  that  she  has  informed  you  that 
this  plan  is  impossible.  She  has  seen  you,  then,  or 
written  to  you.  You  have  seen  her  ?  Where  ?  How  ? 
And  you  expect  me  to  believe  that  you  have  nothing  to 
reproach  yourself  with  —  nor  she  ?  " 

"Well,  then!  I  will  tell  you  all,"  the  young  man 
said,  with  a  manifest  effort,  "both  for  her  sake  and  my 
own.  You,  at  least,  will  not  suspect  her,"  he  continued, 
with  a  change  of  tone,  in  which  trembled  the  remorse 
he  felt  for  the  injustice  of  which  he  himself  had  been 
guilty  toward  her.  "  Yes,  I  saw  my  cousin  this  morn- 
ing, at  eleven  o'clock,  at  the  Tuileries.  A  third  per- 
son was  present.  I  give  you  my  word  of  honour  that 
it  was  the  first  time  that  we  had  ever  met  in  this  way. 
Here  is  the  proof  that  wjiat  I  tell  you  is  true."  And 
he  drew  from  his  pocket-book  Reine's  little  blue  de- 
spatch, and  held  it  out  to  Le  Prieux.  "My  cousin 
wished  to  speak  to  me,  —  through  pity,  as  I  now 
understand, — that  I  might  not  learn  roughly,  and  from 
some  other  person,  the  destruction  of  my  deai-est  hope. 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  249 

And  what  we  said  to  each  other  I  can  repeat  to 
you,  so  that  I  may  prevent  you  from  being,  in  your 
turn,  unjust  to  her."  And  he  began  narrating  the  inci- 
dents of  that  sad  interview  of  the  morning,  —  the  im- 
pression that  the  note  had  made  upon  him,  her  arrival 
on  the  terrace,  and  how  he  had  perceived  the  serious- 
ness of  the  step  she  had  taken  by  her  extreme  pallor, 
and  the  words  that  she  had  spoken,  and  his  replies ; 
lastly,  his  suddenly  aroused  jealousy,  and  the  end. 

The  father  listened  to  the  story  of  these  simple  and 
poignant  episodes,  his  daughter's  letter  in  his  hand.  He 
looked  at  the  writing  and  perceived  its  agitation  with 
a  passionate  pity  for  the  gentle,  refined  child,  who  had 
traced  these  characters  in  a  moment  of  distress.  He 
now  understood  both  the  feverish  brilliancy  in  her  eyes, 
on  her  return  from  this  cruel  interview,  and  the  deci- 
sion in  her  voice  as  she  refused  the  delay  that  her 
parents  offered;  he  understood  also  the  step  taken  by 
Fanny  Perrin,  who  was  undoubtedly  the  third  person 
indicated  by  Charles,  the  innocent  witness  of  this  inno- 
cent rendezvous  between  the  two  cousins.  And,  amid 
these  thoughts,  one  point  remained  darker  than  ever: 
what  motive  had  Reine  for  wishing  this  marriage  with 
Faucherot  when  she  had  freedom  of  choice  ?  The 
answer  to  this  enigma,  he  knew,  alas !  only  too  well, 
where  to  seek.  But  honour  required  him  to  seek  it 
alone.  He  must  not  associate  with  himself  in  this 
inquiry  —  at   whose  end   lay,   he    felt    sure,   his   wife's 


260  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

unscrupulous  machinations  and  her  discreditable  role  — 
the  young  man  whom,  from  that  moment,  he  regarded 
as  their  son-in-law.  He  had  risen  to  his  feet,  when 
Charles's  confession  was  ended,  and  he  paced  the  room, 
back  and  forth,  in  a  silence  that  the  other  dared  not 
disturb.  Although  Charles,  also,  found  Reine's  posi- 
tion more  inexplicable  than  ever,  since  he  knew  that 
the  father  was  so  favourable  to  him,  he  understood, 
with  native  tact,  that  Le  Prieux's  silence  must  be 
respected.  His  heart  beat  violently  when  Le  Prieux 
suddenly  stopped  before  him,  and  looking  at  him 
steadily  for  some  time,  said  at  last,  with  the  solemnity 
in  face  and  gesture  of  one  who  has  taken  a  very  seri- 
ous resolution,  and  makes  known  to  another  an  irrevo- 
cable decision,  — 

"  You  have  answered  me  like  an  honest  man,  Charles, 
loyally,  bravely;  and  I  will  speak  to  you  in  the  same 
way.  You  love  Reine,  and  you  are  worthy  of  her.  She 
loves  you,  and  it  depends  upon  herself  alone  whether 
she  will  be  your  wife,  understand  me,  upon  herself  alone. 
There  has  been  another  proposal  made  for  her  recently, 
it  is  true.  I  can  scarcely  believe  that  that  is  the 
obstacle  to  which  she  referred.  There  must  be  some 
misunderstanding  that  I  cannot  now  explain.  Later 
I  shall  know  what  it  is.  I  repeat  this  to  you,  she 
shall  be  your  wife  whenever  she  chooses.  From  this 
day  forth,  you  have  my  consent.  I  accepted  your  word 
of  honour  just  now,   and  this   gives  me  the   right  to 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  251 

require  it  a  second  time.  I  require  you  to  promise 
that  you  will  not  try  to  see  lier  until  I  authorize  you 
to  do  so.  There  is  great  wisdom  in  our  old  French 
precedent  —  you  must  be  conscious  of  it  yourself — that 
requires  the  intervention  of  parents  in  the  marriage 
of  their  children.  If  you  had  obeyed  it  strictly,  if 
you  had  come  to  me,  a  few  days  ago,  to  speak  to 
me  before  you  spoke  to  her,  you  would  have  spared 
her  much  useless  suffering,  and  would  not  have 
offended  her,  perhaps  irreparably.  She  is  keenly  and 
deeply  sensitive,  and  your  doubt  of  her  must  have 
hurt  her  frightfully.  Leave  it  to  me  to  probe  the 
wound ;  and  further,  since  there  is  a  misunderstand- 
ing to  be  cleared  up,  to  clear  it  up  myself.  I  have 
your  promise  that  you  will  do  nothing  more  except 
upon  my  suggestions  ?  " 

"You  have  it,"  replied  the  young  man,  in  a  trans- 
port of  gratitude,  grasping  the  hands  of  Le  Prieux. 

"  And  you  will  obey  me  in  everything  ?  " 

"  And  I  will  obey  you  in  everything.  Ah,  Monsieur 
Le  Prieux!  I  loved  you  before,  but  now  — " 

"Now,"  interrupted  the  father,  visibly  afraid  of  his 
own  emotion,  "you  will  begin  to  keep  your  promise 
by  sitting  down  here  and  writing  a  letter  to  Reine, 
begging  her  pardon  for  your  words  this  morning.  You 
are  surprised  ?  But  I  have  a  plan ;  I  have  a  plan. 
Come,"  he  added,  with  that  gentle  sarcasm  which 
older  men  like  to  employ  toward  younger,  at  whose  love 


252  OTHER  people's  luxury 

affairs  they  smile,  while  envying  them  secretly,  "shall 
I  have  to  dictate  this  letter?  Write  and  say  what- 
ever you  like.  I  will  give  it  to  Eeine  unopened.  Does 
that  content  you  ?  " 

VIII 

M.    LE   PRIEUX'S    PLAN 

"I  HAVE  a  plan."  With  these  words  repeated  still 
again,  Hector  Le  Prieux  took  leave  of  his  daughter's 
lover,  taking  with  him  the  letter  for  Reine  and  also 
Eeine's  despatch.  "I  will  return  it  to  you,"  he  had 
said  further,  "  when  I  let  you  know  how  things  are 
going  on.     At  present  I  have  need  of  it." 

The  despatch  must  have  touched  him  very  deeply, 
for  Charles  Huguenin,  who  had  stepped  out  upon 
his  balcony  to  watch  his  visitor's  departure,  saw  Le 
Prieux  taking  his  way  under  the  leafless  trees  of  the 
Luxembourg,  the  little  blue  leaflet  open  in  his  hand. 
The  father  walked  on,  dwelling  upon  each  word  of  this 
dear  handwriting,  lost  in  the  thoughts  that  this  contem- 
plation called  up,  to  the  degree  that  he  did  not  notice 
where  he  was  until  he  found  himself  at  the  gate 
opposite  the  rue  Soufflot,  having  crossed  the  whole 
garden  as  in  a  dream.  He  recognized  the  familiar 
sidewalk,  the  omnibus  station,  the  shops — some  changed, 
others  still  the  same.  He  had  been  used,  in  the  early 
days  of  his  literary  career,   to  go  to  read  the  news* 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  253 

papers  in  one  of  the  cafes  near  the  Odeon,  and 
thither  he  now  directed  his  steps,  without  being  really 
conscious  that  he  did  so,  as,  in  moments  of  extreme 
mental  confusion,  we  do  things  almost  automatically. 
As  it  happened,  the  place  was  unchanged.  Decorated 
in  earlier  days  by  artists  who  had  thus  paid  arrear- 
ages in  their  scot,  it  exhibited  in  its  interior  four 
incongruous  panels,  representing,  one,  a  Venus  rising 
from  the  sea;  another,  a  stag  dying  in  a  thicket;  a 
third,  Pierrot  looking  at  the  moon;  the  fourth,  a  girl 
of  the  Latin  Quarter.  The  Bohemianism  of  this 
smoky  tavern  contrasted  no  less  with  the  delicate 
romance  of  Eeine  and  her  cousin  than  with  the  habits 
of  elegance  to  which  the  "beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux" 
had  trained  Hector.  But,  for  the  latter,  the  radiance 
of  his  own  youth  lighted  up  this  resort  of  students 
and  rapins.  He  took  his  seat  at  a  corner  table,  vacant 
at  the  moment,  without  even  remarking  the  attention 
excited  among  the  men  and  girls  who  frequented  the 
place,  all  of  them  rather  slipshod  in  their  appearance, 
by  the  presence  of  a  man  past  fifty  years  of  age, 
attired  like  a  president  of  the  Council,  the  ribbon  of 
the  Legion  of  Honour  in  his  buttonhole,  who  called 
for  writing  materials.  Then,  with  rapid  and  steady 
hand,  he  indited  upon  this  accidental  paper  a  letter 
of  two  pages,  which  he  ended  with  a  signature  almost 
aggressive  in  its  decisiveness.  It  was  addressed  to 
Cmce,  and  he  despatched  it  at  once  by  a  messenger. 


254  OTHER  people's  luxury 

Is  it  needful  to  say  that  these  few  lines  cut  short  in 
advance,  in  his  own  name  and  his  wife's,  the  matri- 
monial advances  of  the  Faucherots?  This  task  accom- 
plished, which  was  the  first  detail  in  his  plan,  he 
looked  at  his  watch.  He  knew  that  in  returning  home 
at  this  moment  he  should  find  there  neither  his  wife 
nor  his  daughter.  It  occurred  to  him,  as  it  so  often 
did,  to  go  to  the  office  and  get  news  from  the  editor- 
in-chief  for  his  chronicle  of  the  next  day.  Then  the 
mere  idea  of  the  slightest  contact  with  his  daily  life, 
before  having  gone  through  the  two  scenes  for  which 
he  was  preparing  himself,  appeared  to  him  odious. 

A  recollection  of  the  habits  of  his  youth  came  to 
his  mind :  "  Why  not  work  here  as  I  used  to  do  ? " 
He  desired  the  waiter  to  bring  him  a  fresh  half  dozen 
sheets  of  writing-paper  and  a  new  pen,  also  to  fill  up 
the  inkstand;  then,  picking  up  one  of  the  soiled 
newspapers  of  the  morning  which  lay  open  on  an 
adjacent  table,  he  sought,  in  the  Fails  Divers,  some 
material  for  his  article.  The  rather  commonplace 
incident  of  a  demi-mondaine  defending  herself  against 
her  dressmaker  caught  his  eye,  because  of  the  aston- 
ishing sum  at  which  the  vanities  of  the  young  woman 
were  rated,  $750  for  a  costume!  And  he  began  writ- 
ing out,  with  a  hand  no  less  deliberate  than  usual,  the 
reflections  which  this  extravagance  suggested  to  him. 
Six  o'clock  struck  while  he  was  still  there,  finishing 
his  twelfth  page.     His  chronique  for  the   morrow  was 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  255 

written.  He  read  it  over  with  singularly  mingled  pride 
and  sadness;  for  tlie  first  time,  perhaps  in  years,  he 
had  written  something  of  which  he  was  not  in  his 
heart  ashamed,  and  it  was  because  he  had  written, 
not  as  a  matter  of  duty,  but  to  please  himself,  as  he 
had  formerly  dreamed  of  writing  both  poems  and 
novels,  when  he  used  to  come  to  talk  or  scribble  in 
this  humble  cafe  more  than  thirty  years  before.  This 
impression,  so  well  in  harmony  with  the  rest  of  his 
day,  would  have  further  strengthened  Le  Prieux  in 
his  desire  to  spare  his  daughter  the  grief  of  a  destiny 
unfulfilled,  had  not  his  nerves  been  already  strained  to 
that  degree  where  the  whole  being  is  nothing  but  will 
and  energy.  It  was,  indeed,  this  over-excitement  of  his 
entire  nature,  rendering  the  time  insupportable  to 
him,  which  he  had  beguiled,  so  to  speak,  by  writing, 
—  one  of  those  phenomena  of  professional  automaton- 
ism  which  are  fovmd  in  all  vocations,  and  prove,  by 
the  way,  how  one's  trade  becomes  a  kind  of  second 
nature,  the  instinct  within  us  of  a  veritable  social 
species.  This  diatribe  against  luxury  and  the  slavery 
which  it  imposes  had  not  merely  had  the  result  of  help- 
ing the  journalist  to  pass  his  two  hours.  It  went  on 
acting  upon  him  in  two  ways,  —  first,  by  auto-sugges- 
tion, as  happens  often  to  literary  men,  so  easily  intoxi- 
cated with  their  own  utterances,  and  then,  by  recalling 
to  his  mind  the  facts  and  figures  of  which  he  had  been 
thinking. 


266  OTHER  people's  luxury 

"  Six  o'clock,"  he  said  to  himself,  as  he  left  the 
cafe,  "  and  I  will  take  a  carriage  from  the  Odeon.  In 
twenty  minutes  I  shall  be  at  home.  That  will  be 
about  the  time  of  their  return.  Then  I  can  talk  with 
Eeine  before  dinner.  I  must  make  sure  to  save  the 
poor  child  from  a  night's  distress.  How  glad  she  will 
be  to  have  this  letter  from  Charles !  Fanny  Perrin 
was  right.  The  other  marriage  would  have  killed  her. 
But  why  did  she  consent?  That  I  shall  know,  in  the 
end."  By  this  time  he  had  stopped  an  empty  fiacre  and 
taken  his  seat  in  it.  The  question  to  which  his  mind 
had  reverted  incessantly  since  the  preceding  day  again 
had  him  in  its  grasp.  "  Yes,"  he  continued  to  him- 
self, "  what  is  it  that  Mathilde  said  to  her  to  overcome 
her  resistance,  which  she  would  not  repeat  to  her 
cousin?  What  is  this  mysterious  reason  which  evi- 
dently terrorizes  her  ?  But  Mathilde  herself,  why  did 
she  seem  to  be  so  very  anxious  for  this  marriage  ? 
These  Faucherots  have  nothing  to  recommend  them 
but  their  money.  —  Money !  money  !  —  But  Mathilde 
is  not  so  fond  of  money.  She  is  very  generous.  And 
still,  in  this  absurd  life  that  we  live,  we  need  it  —  almost 
as  much  as  that  wretched  girl  about  whom  I  have  just 
been  writing.  Thirty-seven  hundred  and  fifty  francs  for 
a  costume  !  —  Mathilde  has  never  been  so  extravagant  as 
that;  but  with  all  her  economies  and  all  her  good 
management,  she  goes  to  the  most  expensive  places, 
and  since  Reine  has  been  out  it  costs  double." 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  257 

Le  Prieux,  like  all  husbands  and  fathers,  only  knew 
approximately  what  were  the  expenses  of  his  wife  and 
daughter.  By  an  unavoidable  association  of  ideas,  he 
suddenly  asked  himself,  "  I  wonder  how  much  they  do 
really  spend  ?  "  and,  like  a  flash,  through  his  attempt  to 
estimate  closely  these  expenses,  an  unlooked-for  hypothe- 
sis crossed  his  mind,  which  he  vainly  sought  to  banish. 
'^Mon  Dieu!"  he  said  to  himself,  "what  if  she  has 
run  in  debt,  and  dares  not  tell  me  ?  What  if  she  has 
incurred  obligations  to  Madame  Paucherot?  What  if 
that  were  the  motive,  both  of  her  desire  for  this  mar- 
riage and  of  Reine's  consent  to  it  ?  —  No,  that  would 
be  too  horrible  !  —  It  cannot  be !     It  cannot  be !  " 

Thus  we  see  that  the  unconscious  working  of  a  mind 
under  the  influence  of  very  intense  feelings,  whose 
deep  and  secret  life  this  mental  action  is,  had  led  this 
husband,  no  inquisitor  by  nature,  to  the  very  edge  of 
the  truth.  He  "burned,"  as  children  say  in  their  game 
of  hide-and-seek.  But  this  divination  would  make  still 
more  painful  to  him  the  execution  of  the  plan  he  had 
mentioned  to  Charles,  which  was  in  the  main  this : 
to  give  Reine  her  cousin's  letter,  and  in  her  first  excite- 
ment at  receiving  it,  obtain  from  her  a  confession  and 
a  consent.  He  would  then  have  to  overcome  his  wife's 
objections,  and  it  was  for  this  use  that  he  had  kept 
the  little  blue  despatch.  Even  after  so  many  accusing 
signs,  he  did  not  doubt,  he  would  not  doubt,  Mathilde ; 
in  the  presence  of  a  proof  so  unquestionable   as  this 


258  OTHER  people's  luxury 

of  their  daughter's  inclinations  she  would  not  persist 
in  a  project  whose  savage  cruelty  she  certainly  had 
never  suspected.  The  mysterious  reason  that  Eeine 
had  refused  to  reveal  would  prove  to  be  a  misunder- 
standing, as  he  himself  had  called  it.  Though  he 
hammered  this  idea  into  his  mind,  with  all  the  strength 
of  his  love  for  his  wife,  this  man,  clear-sighted,  not- 
withstanding his  affections,  did  not  succeed  in  driving 
out  the  other  idea,  sprung,  it  seemed,  from  the  most 
accidental  putting  together  of  facts ;  and  when  he  in- 
serted into  the  lock  of  his  door  the  little  gold  night- 
key  —  a  gift  from  his  wife,  of  course  —  which  he  wore 
as  an  elegant  bibelot  on  his  watch  chain,  this  other 
idea  again  oppressed  him,  in  a  way  singularly  painful. 
How  else  should  have  recurred  to  him,  in  these  cir- 
cumstances and  at  this  moment,  the  words  of  one  of 
the  great  Parisian  publishers,  whom  he  had  chanced  to 
meet  at  a  first  performance  not  long  before ?  "I  am 
establishing  a  review,  Le  Prieux,"  the  publisher  had 
said;  "suppose  you  write  your  reminiscences  for  me. 
Afterward  I  would  publish  them  in  a  volume,  and 
we  should  make  it  pay  twice.  What  do  you  say  ? " 
And  the  newspaper  man  had  replied,  "My  reminis- 
cences ?  How  could  I  have  any  ?  I  have  never  had 
time  to  live!" 

Why  did  this  conversation  recur  to  his  mind,  as  he 
stood  on  the  landing  at  the  door  of  his  apartment, 
except  because  he  was  already  thinking  how  he  could 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  259 

find  means  to  increase  his  income  for  the  present 
year  ?  He  saw  before  him  the  possibility  of  a  new- 
engagement,  besides  all  that  he  now  had  to  do.  What 
deficit  was  he  then  trying  to  make  good?  But,  no 
sooner  had  he  entered  the  antechamber  than  something 
unexpected  turned  the  current  of  his  thoughts.  He 
perceived  a  visitor's  overcoat  and  cane  on  the  table; 
and  the  groom,  who  was  on  duty  as  footman,  replied 
to  his  inquiry,  that  M.  Cruce  was  in  the  salon  with 
madame. 

"  And  also  mademoiselle  ?  "  Le  Prieux  asked. 

"  Mademoiselle  is  in  her  own  room,"  replied  the  boy. 
"  She  has  not  been  out  this  afternoon.     She  is  not  well." 

Cruce  there,  at  that  hour  —  this  implied,  without 
doubt,  that  Mathilde  was  already  informed  of  the  domes- 
tic coup  d'etat  by  which  Hector  had  substituted  his 
letter  breaking  off  negotiations  for  the  letter  of  ac- 
quiescence which  he  had  offered  to  carry,  and  under 
what  conditions !  It  meant,  also,  that  an  explauEi- 
tion  between  husband  and  wife  was  now  inevitable, 
and  must  be  immediate.  Le  Prieux  did  not  hesi- 
tate. First  he  must  see  Eeine,  and  have  from  her  full 
power  to  act.  He  said  to  the  little  groom,  "It  is  not 
necessary  to  disturb  madame.  Do  not  announce  my 
return."  Then  he  went  to  his  daughter's  door  and 
knocked.  The  "  who  is  it  ?  "  so  faintly  spoken  that  he 
could  scarcely  hear  the  words,  touched  him  almost  to 
tears,  such  lassitude  did  it  indicate,  and  still  more,  the 


260  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

total  darkness  in  which  he  found  himself,  on  entering 
the  room.  Under  pretext  of  the  coming  on  of  an  attack 
of  neuralgia,  Eeine  had  retreated  to  bed,  with  the  shut- 
ters closed,  the  curtains  let  down,  in  that  intentional 
darkness  in  which  all  women  have  the  instinct  to  hide 
themselves,  to  bury  themselves,  when  they  suffer  with 
one  kind  of  suffering,  as  if  even  the  light  were  to  them 
one  of  the  brutalities  of  life.  And  when  she  had 
turned  on  the  electric  light,  under  that  hard  white 
glare,  which  brings  out  more  crudely  the  stigmata  on 
a  face,  her  father  saw  such  marks  of  suffering  that  he 
was  afraid  for  a  moment  of  the  shock  of  joy  that  she 
was  about  to  receive.  But  already  she  was  leaning  on 
her  elbow  on  the  embroidered  pillows  of  her  little  bed, 
as  she  had  so  often  done  when,  as  a  child,  he  had  come  to 
take  her  by  surprise  and  kiss  her  before  going  out  in  the 
evening ;  and  now  with  childish  grace,  and  that  care  for 
others,  a  lovely  trait,  which  was  the  natural  expression  of 
her  tender  and  exquisite  nature,  she  said,  — 

"You  must  not  be  disturbed  about  me,  dear  P6e.  I 
was  a  little  cold,  in  returning  from  the  lecture ;  here 
in  bed,  I  shall  soon  get  warm  again.  And  in  the  morn- 
ing, to-morrow,  your  busy  day,  I  shall  be  up  early  to 
have  your  things  all  in  order  for  you." 

"You  will  be  able  to  sleep  late  to-morrow,"  Hector 
said,  drawing  from  his  pocket  the  pages  scribbled  in  the 
caf^.  "My  morning's  work  is  done  in  advance.  Your 
Pie  will  have  no  need  of  you,  Mademoiselle  Moigne, 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  2G1 

and  for  once  you  can  be  as  slothful  as  you  please. 
And  besides,"  he  said,  after  a  minute's  silence,  and  in 
a  tone  which  he  strove  still  to  render  playful,  while 
his  concealed  anxiety  trembled  in  the  feigned  gayety; 
"besides,  some  one  has  given  me  a  letter  for  you." 
And  he  held  it  out  to  her. 

"  Some  one  ?  "  Reine  said ;  and  when  she  had  the  let- 
ter in  her  hands  and  recognized  the  writing,  the  colour 
rushed  to  her  face,  and  she  trembled  with  an  almost 
convulsive  movement  that  shook  her  whole  frame, 
while   her   father   strove   to   comfort  her. 

"Read  your  letter,  my  adored  child,"  he  said,  "and 
do  not  be  afraid.  Take  courage !  If  I  bring  it  to  you, 
you  must  know  that  Charles  has  told  me  all,  and  that 
I  approve.  We  must  have  no  more  misunderstand- 
ings. My  sweet  lovely  Moigne,  read  your  letter.  Do 
not  speak  to  me  till  after  you  have  read  it.  I  love  you 
so,  my  daughter,  my  little  girl ! "  And  once  more  with 
that  attempt  at  playfulness  in  his  petting,  which  seeks 
to  shelter  from  the  excesses  of  feeling  a  sensitiveness  too 
young  and  too  keen  to  bear  them,  he  continued,  "  If 
you  do  not  read  it,  this  letter  of  yours,  I  shall  take  it 
away  and  read  it  aloud  to  you  myself." 

While  Le  Prieux  spoke,  the  blood  rushed  again  to 
the  forehead  and  cheeks  of  Reine,  and  even  to  her  soft 
and  slender  neck  rising  from  the  soft  batiste  of  her 
night-dress,  over  which  lay  the  long,  loose  braid  of  her 
hair.     The  open,  ruffled  sleeves  showed  her  arms,  slender 


262  OTHER  people's  luxury 

and  very  white,  with  their  delicate  network  of  bluish 
veins.  Scarcely  was  the  coverlet  of  quilted  silk  lifted  by 
her  form,  so  slender,  so  very  delicate,  almost  too  frail 
for  her  age ;  and  the  man  who  watched  her  open  the 
envelope  with  her  trembling  hands  was  still  further 
touched  by  this  vision  of  his  child's  fragility.  He  was 
overcome,  in  her  presence,  by  that  absolutely  peculiar 
pitifulness  which  makes  a  father  and  a  mother  the 
passionate  slaves  of  the  least  wishes  of  a  creature  whose 
delicacy  seems  to  them  so  exposed  to  harm,  so  easily  to 
be  wounded !  They  would  give  their  own  lives  to  spare 
their  child  the  least  suffering,  the  least  touch  of  hurt. 
The  sight  of  any  pain  inflicted  upon  this  fragile  organ- 
ism is  to  them  almost  a  physical  anguish,  touching  them 
at  the  most  sensitive  point  of  their  natures.  And  so  it 
was  that,  in  seeing  Eeine's  face  suddenly  contract  and 
turn  white  as  she  read  Charles's  letter  which  begged 
forgiveness,  her  eyes  close,  her  head  sink  back  upon 
the  pillow  in  a  half  swoon  of  too  intense  emotion,  Le 
Prieux  was  struck  with  a  sudden  terror  which  made  him 
start  forward  and  clasp  his  daughter  in  his  arms,  and 
kiss  her  forehead,  and  say  to  her, — 

"Keine,  calm  yourself,  Eeine,  Reine!  How  could  I 
be  so  abrupt  and  stupid !  And  I  thought  she  would  be 
glad.  My  child !  my  child !  Joy  makes  you  ill.  Smile 
at  me.  Ah!  you  open  your  eyes,  you  smile.  Thank 
you !  But  how  could  you  keep  this  secret  in  your  poor 
heart  ?     The  other  day,  when  your  mother  talked  with 


OTHER   people's    LUXURY  263 

you,  wliy  did  you  not  say  to  her,  '  I  love  my  cousin ;  we 
love  each  other '  ?  But  all  that  is  over  now !  Smile  at 
me  again.  He  asks  your  hand.  You  are  going  to  marry 
him.     Why  do  you  shake  your  head  ?  " 

"  Because  I  shall  not  marry  him,"  the  girl  said ;  and 
even  in  her  feeble  tones,  overcome  as  she  was  by  the 
excitement  of  the  moment,  her  father  again  detected 
that  singular  firmness  which  had  struck  him  so  forcibly 
when  she  had  refused  the  offered  delay. 

"  You  will  not  marry  him  ?  "  the  father  repeated ; 
"  but  why  not  ?  " 

"  Because  I  have  reflected  seriously,"  Eeine  answered, 
in  a  still  more  decided  tone,  "and  I  do  not  think  we 
should  be  happy  together." 

"No,  my  child,"  said  Le  Prieux,  sadly,  and  he  laid 
his  hand  upon  her  lips,  "  do  not  begin  again  your  attempt 
to  deceive  me.  You  see,  now  that  I  know  all,  it  is  no 
longer  possible.  Yes,  I  know  what  passed  at  the  ball, 
what  Charles  said  to  you  then,  and  what  you  replied. 
Would  you  have  spoken  in  that  way  if  you  had  not 
already  reflected,  and  been  sure  that  you  would  be  happy 
with  him  and  that  you  would  make  him  happy  ?  When 
you  kissed  me  before  going  to  your  mother's  room  yester- 
day morning,  I  know  what  you  thought.  Shall  I  re- 
peat it  to  you  ?  You  thought  that  your  mother  was 
about  to  tell  you  of  a  proposed  marriage  with  Charles, 
and  you  were  very,  very  happy.  Do  not  deny  this.  I 
read  it  in  your  eyes  that  moment,  though  I  did  not  quite 


264  OTHER  people's  luxury 

understand.  But  now  I  do.  You  liad  already  reflected 
at  that  time,  surely.  And  I  know,  further,  that  you 
wrote  to  your  cousin  yesterday,  and  that  you  met  him 
this  morning.  Do  not  blush,  my  love,  nor  tremble.  If 
you  could  read  my  heart,  you  would  find  there  no  feeling 
except  remorse  that  I  could  not  have  understood  yours 
before.  But  that  heart  is  transparent  to  me  now. 
And  I  also  know  the  reason  which  prevents  you  from 
being  willing  to  marry  him  whom  you  love  —  this  reason 
that  Charles  begged  in  vain  that  you  would  tell  him. 
It  is  our  situation  that  prevents  you.  You  have  said 
to  yourself,  'If  I  marry  Edgard  Eaucherot,  I  shall  be 
rich,  and  my  father  will  not  work  so  hard.'  Confess 
it,  this  is  what  you  thought.  You  are  like  your  mother ; 
you  are  unhappy  in  seeing  me  have  so  much  to  do.  But 
it  is  my  life,  this  writing.  I  am  an  old  horse  that  must 
go  on  in  harness.  If  I  stopped,  I  should  die.  What  I 
need  is  not  to  work  less ;  it  is  to  be  able  to  say  to 
myself,  as  I  sit  at  my  table,  *  My  little  Moigne  is 
happy.'  And  as  to  our  debts  — "  he  watched  his 
daughter's  face,  as  he  said  the  word,  so  terrible  for 
him.  If  Reine  did  not  start  up  with  an  impulsive 
denial,  it  would  be  true  that  they  were  in  debt,  and  that 
she  knew  it.  She  did  start,  but  it  was  only  with  sur- 
prise, and  without  daring  to  deny  what  he  said ;  and  the 
father  went  on,  inventing,  to  convince  his  daughter, 
one  of  those  deceptions  that  surely  are  not  inscribed 
above,  in  the  book  of  our  sins :    "  As   to   our  debts,  I 


OTHER  people's   LUXURY  265 

shall  not  have  to  work  any  harder  in  order  to  pay 
them.  I  have  had  an  offer  lately  for  my  two  farms  at 
Chevagnes."  (They  had  been,  alas!  mortgaged  long  ago 
to  the  utmost  extent  their  value  would  allow.)  "  I  shall 
have  no  need  of  them  now,"  he  continued,  ''  now  that  I 
can  go  to  you  in  Provence,  by  and  by,  when  I  am  old. 
Eor  you  will  say  yes,  I  am  sure,  and  marry  your  cousin. 
Come  —  what  if  I  make  your  mother  ask  you  to  do 
it?" 

"  Ah ! "  Eeine  moaned,  "  mamma  never  will  consent." 
"  But  if  she  does  consent,  and  even  asks  you  herself  ? 
Would  it  be  yes,  then,  tell  me  ?  " 

*'  It  would  be  yes,"  the  young  girl  said,  so  softly  that 
this  avowal  of  her  feeling  for  her  cousin  and  renuncia- 
tion of  her  great  sacrifice,  came  from  her  lips  rather 
as  a  sigh  than  a  word;  and  passing  her  arms  around 
her  father's  neck,  she  hid  her  face,  covered  this  time 
with  shy  and  happy  blushes,  against  his  shoulder — the 
shoulder  that  was  a  little  higher  than  the  other,  from 
the  innumerable  hours  spent  at  his  writing-table,  pen 
in  hand.  How  little  did  this  embrace  resemble  the 
cold  kiss  of  the  morning,  which  had  sealed  Eeine's  con- 
sent to  her  marriage  with  young  Faucherot,  when  the 
father  came  very  near  believing  in  his  daughter's  most 
woful  vanity,  and  the  daughter  in  the  father's  most 
woful  blindness,  if  not  his  most  selfish  abandonment ! 
At  this  moment,  clasped  in  each  other's  arms,  they 
enjoyed    that    absolute    communion    of    two    souls    in 


266  OTHER  people's  luxury 

happy  affection  —  the  absolute  fusion  that  love  with 
its  jealousies  and  its  disturbance  of  the  senses  so  rarely 
knows,  and  even  friendship  so  rarely  —  which  is  the 
divine  poetry  of  family  life,  the  compensation  for  its 
wearisome,  everyday  duties,  its  depressing  monotony, 
its  limitations,  and  its  mediocrity. 

An  arrival  that  might  easily  have  been  foreseen  — 
but  how  could  Reine  and  her  father  have  thought  of 
it?  —  was  about  to  drag  them  roughly  from  the  ineffa- 
ble sweetness  of  this  perfect  mutual  comprehension,  and 
awaken,  in  the  father,  an  energy  and  presence  of  mind 
which  he  had  never  before  had,  and  would  never  have 
again,  for  any  interests  of  his  own:  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
just  then  entered  the  room.  Hector  knew  too  well  all 
the  phases  of  expression  on  this  haughty,  beautiful  face 
that  he  had  so  much  loved,  that  he  still  loved  so  much, 
to  be  deceived  for  a  moment,  especially  knowing  that 
Mathilda  had  just  received  a  visit  from  Cruee.  She 
arrived,  angry  and  indignant.  That  he  should  have 
dared  what  he  had,  that  he  should  have  intercepted  her 
letter,  upon  which  they  had  already  agreed,  and  sub- 
stituted for  it  another  written  by  himself  and  in  terms 
exactly  contrary,  was  an  act  so  unprecedented  that 
she  could  hardly  believe  it  had  taken  place.  The  out- 
break of  her  indignation  was,  so  to  speak,  restrained 
by  her  stupefaction;  and  she  did  not  attribute  the 
responsibility  to  Hector.  The  glance  which  she  cast 
at   her  daughter  made   it   evident  that,   in  her   mind, 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  267 

Beine  was  the  true  culprit.  But  her  imperious  lips 
had  not  even  time  to  question  her  two  victims,  hereto- 
fore so  silent,  so  docile  under  the  dictatorship  of  her 
egoism.  She  had  not  taken  two  steps  in  the  room  before 
Le  Prieux  had  started  up,  with  an  enthusiasm  she  had 
never  before  seen  in  his  usually  placid  face,  saying  to 
her,  in  a  tone  at  once  affectionate  and  imperative,  in 
which  she  felt,  with  still  greater  surprise,  an  authority 
that  admitted  of  no  dispute, — 

"  I  was  coming  to  look  for  you,  Mathilde,  to  bring 
you  here  to  talk  to  this  great  girl  of  ours,  who  had 
no  confidence  in  us,  who  would  not  understand  that 
we  only  desired  her  happiness,  and  only  spoke  to  her 
about  young  Faucherot  because  we  believed  her  heart 
was  free.  And  she  has  just  confessed  to  me  that  it 
is  not,  that  she  loves  her  cousin  Charles  and  is  loved 
by  him.  And  this  other  big  child,  Charles,  who  did 
not  dare  to  come  and  speak  to  us  and  say  to  us,  'I 
love  Heine ! '  —  could  one  think  children  would  be  so 
foolish!  If  I  had  not  seen  Charles  to-day  and  com- 
pelled this  confession,  first  from  him  and  then  from 
her,  we  never  should  have  known  it.  Do  you  under- 
stand, she  would  have  done  this  thing  to  you  and 
me,  to  you,  her  mother,  and  to  me,  her  father,  marry- 
ing against  her  inclinations  ?  Go,  Reine,  kiss  your 
mother  and  beg  her  to  forgive  you;  beg  pardon  of  us 
both,  for  having  doubted  us,  when  we  implored  you 
ourselves,  this    very    morning,   to   take   more   time   to 


268  OTHER  people's  luxury 

reflect  and  answer  us.  You  knew  that  we  wished  to 
leave  you  free,  that  you  were  the  absolute  mistress  of 
your  choice.     That  is  so,  Mathilde,  is  it  not?" 

"Reine  has  always  been  free,"  replied  the  mother, 
literally  suffocated  by  what  she  heard,  "and  if  she 
loves  her  cousin,  I  do  not  understand  why  — " 

"  //  she  loves  him ! "  interrupted  Le  Prieux ;  and 
he  added  with  noticeable  firmness,  looking  his  wife 
steadily  in  the  eyes,  "Oh,  yes!  she  does  love  him, 
and  she  will  marry  him."  Then,  seeing  that  Mathilde 
was  about  to  interrupt  him,  he  continued,  "Fortu- 
nately, we  had  not  replied  to  our  cousin  Huguenin. 
Reine  does  not  know  that  she  wrote  to  sound  us. 
The  poor  dear  lady  lives  in  the  country.  She  felt 
obliged  to  be  so  careful  that  we  should  not  know  her 
son  had  asked  her  to  write ;  and  was  she  not,  Mathilde  ? 
We  supposed  it  to  be  altogether  her  own  idea.  But 
you  were  quite  right  to  insist  that  Reine  ought  to  be 
told  about  it,  and  I  was  wrong  to  keep  you  from 
telling  her.      But  it  is  all  made  right  now !  " 

At  this  mention  of  the  letter  from  Charles's  mother, 
Mme.  Le  Prieux  was  so  disconcerted  that  she  had 
not  the  strength  to  make  any  reply.  Hector  then 
knew  of  the  arrival  of  this  letter  and  her  concealment 
of  it.  How  could  he  know?  And  he  forgave  her' 
dissimulation.  He  did  more.  He  was  endeavouring 
to  prevent  their  daughter  from  suspecting  it.  And  in 
her   amazement   and    her    increasing    confusion    Mme. 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  269 

Le  Prieux  liad  not  the  strength  to  resist  her  hus- 
band's hand,  drawing  her  toward  Eeine's  bed ;  and 
he  continued, — 

"Do  you  know  why  this  wicked  girl  concealed  her 
feelings  from  us  ?  It  was  because  she  thought  it  her 
duty  to  be  rich,  that  she  might  save  me  from  over- 
work. That  was  your  fault,  mon  amie.  Yes,  that 
was  your  fault.  You  set  her  the  examj)le.  Why  did 
you  fear  to  tell  me  yourself  what  you  told  her,  that 
we  were  a  little  in  arrears  ?  You  also  were  afraid  I 
should  be  writing  a  few  more  articles  —  confess  it ! 
But  what  is  that  if  I  do,  compared  with  the  grief  of 
seeing  our  daughter  unhappy  ?  I  should  never  have 
forgiven  myself." 

Did  he  really  believe  what  he  said,  the  poor  literary 
day-labourer,  or  was  this  a  second  falsehood  even  more 
generous  than  the  first,  to  complete  the  saving  of  the 
mother's  prestige  in  the  eyes  of  the  daughter,  and  at 
the  same  time  destroy  the  strongest  objection  that 
Mathilde  had  been  able  to  bring  forward  against 
the  marriage  with  Charles  ?  Love  is  sometimes  as 
blind  as  that.  But,  also,  love  is  sometimes  extremely 
delicate,  even  though  clear-sighted;  and  indulgent,  even 
when  the  wrong-doing  is  past  all  doubt.  Whatever 
may  have  been  the  motive  which  Hector  obeyed, 
his  words  indicated  an  extreme  of  generosity  which 
would  have  touched  to  tears  any  other  person  than 
Mathilde.     But  this  woman's  pride  was  rendered  still 


270  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

more  implacable  by  the  strange  depravity  of  con- 
science which  made  her  believe  that  she  had  always, 
in  all  circumstances,  laboured  for  her  husband's  and 
her  daughter's  best  interest.  What  she  suddenly  be- 
came aware  of,  in  her  husband's  words,  was  that  Eeine 
had  broken  a  promise  given  her.  How  could  this 
wife,  accustomed  to  see  in  the  journalist  the  most 
credulous  and  easy-going  of  husbands,  have  guessed 
at  the  labour  of  induction  and  diplomacy  which  had 
brought  him  to  a  discovery  of  the  truth?  Her 
maternal  indignation  against  what  she  believed  to  be 
her  daughter's  treachery  had  that  ingenuousness  in  its 
violence  which  is  the  sole  excuse  of  these  predatory 
natures.  The  excess  of  their  personality  would  be 
too  inhuman,  were  it  not  to  a  certain  degree  simple- 
minded  and  irresponsible.  And  then  the  "beautiful 
Mme.  Le  Prieux "  was  horribly  humiliated  to  find  her- 
self caught  in  flagrante  delictu  of  imposture  by  a  man 
whom  she  had  always  known  hypnotized  with  idol- 
atry before  her.  There  was  a  solace  to  this  painful 
feeling  in  the  attitude  of  indignant  hauteur  that  she 
had  the  right  to  take,  toward  another  person,  but 
in  his  presence.  Her  instinct  of  savage  egoism  in- 
stantly seized  upon  this  revenge.  Scarcely  had  Hec- 
tor ceased  speaking  before  she  had  freed  her  hand 
from  his,  and,  turning  away  from  her  daughter's  bed- 
side, she  said, — 

"  And  I  will  never  forgive  Keine  for  having  betrayed 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  271 

to  you  what  I  desired  to  conceal.  Well,  yes,  it  is  tru6," 
she  continued;  "it  was  my  wish  to  conceal  from  you 
certain  embarrassments  in  our  situation.  I  had  the 
right  to  do  it  —  more  than  that,  it  was  a  duty.  It  is 
true  that  I  saw,  that  I  still  see,"  and  she  laid  stress 
upon  this  affirmation,  "in  this  marriage  with  Edgard 
Faucherot  a  most  reasonable  alliance,  one  most  suited 
to  his  position  and  to  ours.  Still,  if  she  had  spoken 
to  me  as  she  has  to  you,"  and  the  secret  jealousy  she 
had  always  felt  at  Reine's  preference  for  her  father  be- 
trayed itself  in  these  words,  "  I  should  have  allowed  her 
to  decide  in  accordance  with  what  she  believes  to  be  her 
feelings.     There  was  no  need  of  this  duplicity  for  that." 

"  Mamma ! "  Eeine  implored,  clasping  her  hands. 

"  She  has  not  deserved  to  have  you  speak  to  her  thus," 
the  father  said  in  his  turn.  "  She  told  me  nothing.  I 
divined  it  myself." 

"  She  made  her  plans  so  that  you  could  divine  it,"  re- 
plied the  mother,  "  and  that  is  worse.  I  repeat  to  you, 
that  I  shall  never  forgive  her.  As  to  the  other  matter," 
she  concluded,  with  concentrated  bitterness,  "  you  are  her 
father  and  the  head  of  the  family.  It  is  your  wish  that 
she  marry  her  cousin.  She  will  marry  him.  She  will 
go  to  live  in  the  country,  far  from  Paris,  in  a  small  way, 
an  exile  from  society.  Then,  she  will  be  truly  unhappy ; 
and  the  one  thing  I  require  of  you  and  of  her  is,  that  no 
complaints  of  this  misfortune  shall  ever  be  made  to  me. 
I  have  done  all  that  I  could  to  prevent  it." 


^72  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

She  went  toward  the  door,  flinging  at  her  daughter 
and  at  Hector  this  malediction,  pronounced  in  the  name 
of  that  "  struggle  for  high  life "  which  had  become  to 
her  a  kind  of  dogma,  a  religion.  She  did  not  even  turn 
her  head  to  reply  to  a  second  appeal  from  Reine,  who 
again  implored  her,  — 

"  Mamma,  do  not  go  away  like  that.  Let  me  explain 
to  you  — "  And  when  Mme.  Le  Prieux  had  closed  the 
door,  the  young  girl  threw  herself  into  her  father's  arms, 
moaning,  "Ah!  mamma  does  not  love  me!  She  does 
not  love  me ! " 

"  Never  say  that,  my  child ! "  cried  Le  Prieux,  in  a 
tone  of  real  distress ;  "  never  say  it,  never  think  it !  It 
is  because  your  mother  loves  you  so  much,  on  the  con- 
trary, that  she  has  been  so  disturbed  about  your  mar- 
riage. She  will  get  over  it.  I  will  talk  with  her  about 
the  matter.  She  will  understand.  Or  if  she  does  not 
entirely,  you  must  feel  that  it  is  your  fault.  You  are 
like  me,  my  poor  Reine,  you  cannot  show  your  true 
self.  All  that  your  mother  has  done  in  this  case,  as 
in  every  other,  she  has  done  for  what  she  believes  to 
be  our  good,  yours  and  mine.  She  has  had  the  same 
ambition  for  us  that  she  would  have  wished  others  to 
have  for  her.  You  can  expect  anything  from  others, 
you  know,  except  that  they  should  change  their  way  of 
regarding  life.  She  was  born  a  great  lady ;  and  you  and 
I  are,  at  heart,  at  the  very  bottom  of  our  souls,  peasants. 
We  do  not  belong  to  Paris.     She  cannot  know  this.    And, 


OTHER  people's  ltjxury  273 

especially,  do  not  blame  her  for  anything  on  my  account, 
as  I  have  sometimes  seen  you  tempted  to  do,  my  child. 
I  said  the  truth  to  you  just  now.  A  few  articles  more 
or  less  to  be  wi'itten  —  what  does  that  matter  to  me  ?  I 
understand.  You  always  dream  of  my  writing  books  — 
poems,  or  a  novel.  It  is  too  late,  too  late.  If  I  were  at 
liberty,  and  had  all  my  time  for  myself,  I  could  not  do 
it  now.  I  have  let  you  feel  far  too  long  that  this  made 
me  sad.  It  is  true,  I  often  have  been  sad,  these  last 
years.  I  have  seemed  like  a  man  who  has  made  a  failure 
of  his  life.  You  have  believed  me  when  I  complained, 
my  sweet  Eeine,  and  you  should  not  have  done  it. 
And  you  have  been  tempted  to  blame  your  mother. 
Do  not  say  no.  Now  look  at  me,"  and  taking  the  girl's 
hands  in  his  he  made  her  look  at  hiin  full  in  the  eyes ; 
and  all  the  pride  of  a  generous  soid,  in  which  rises  the 
consciousness  of  what  it  has  wished,  suddenly  lighted  the 
face  of  this  great  lover.  "  You  can  read  me  to  the  bottom 
of  my  heart,  my  child,"  he  said.  "I  am  sincere  with 
you  as  I  should  be  in  the  presence  of  death.  No ;  I  have 
not  made  a  failure  of  my  life.  When  I  was  twenty  years 
old  and  wished  to  be  a  poet,  what  did  I  understand  by 
that?  To  have  beautiful  dreams,  and  to  realize  them. 
Very  well !  I  have  had  the  most  beautiful  of  dreams, 
and  I  have  realized  it,  for  I  married  the  woman  I  loved, 
I  made  her  happy,  and  I  have  you,  my  daughter.  Your 
mother's  happiness  —  that  is  my  work!"  Then,  as  if 
somewhat  afraid  of  his  own  emotion  and  of  the  things 


274  OTHER  people's  luxury 

lie  had  begun  to  say  about  himself,  he  shook  his  head, 
and  with  the  glimmer  of  a  smile  he  added,  in  a  familiar 
tone  of  professional  sarcasm,  "Not  the  whole  of  my 
work.  It  is  only  the  first  volume.  There  is  a  second — 
your  happiness.  Aid  me  in  getting  it  ready  for  pub- 
lication. And  tell  me,  do  you  know,  in  all  literature, 
many  books  that  are  worth  as  much  as  these  two  ? " 


IX 


EPILOGUE 

Nearly  three  years  have  passed   since  the  second 
volume    of    Hector    Le    Prieux's    "  Complete   Works " 

—  to    continue    his    own    harmless    professional    joke 

—  was  published,  under  the  form  of  the  marriage 
bans  of  Mile.  Reine-Marie-Therese  Le  Prieux  and  M. 
Charles-Photius  Huguenin;  and  it  is  almost  two  years 
since  the  birth  of  a  granddaughter,  baptized  under  the 
invocation  of  Sainte  Mathilde,  offered  an  opportunity  to 
E-eine's  mother  to  become  reconciled  with  this  charm- 
ing pair  of  married  lovers  —  at  home  there,  on  the  shore 
of  a  sapphire  sea,  under  the  clear  southern  sky,  among 
the  olive  trees  and  the  Aleppo  pines,  with  old  Panny, 
now  promoted  to  the  rank  of  nursery-governess,  on 
the  one  hand,  and  the  Huguenin  parents  on  the  other, 
in  the  ancestral  mas,  defended  from  the  mistral  by  a 
black  screen  of  cypress  trees  against  which  roses  are  in 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  275 

bloom.  But  one  must  believe  —  and  this  is  the  excuse 
to  be  made  for  the  "  beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux "  — 
that  this  lack  of  comprehension  of  others'  feelings,  from 
which  her  husband  and  child  suffered  so  much,  is  really, 
in  certain  natures,  an  infirmity  which  no  experience  can 
correct.  One  is  compelled  also  to  believe  —  and  this 
is  the  condemnation  of  the  brilliant  and  factitious  envi- 
ronment of  which  this  woman  is  the  living  incarnation 
—  that  this  existence,  with  its  intensely  stimulated  van- 
ity and  its  besetting  envy  of  one's  neighbour's  luxury, 
is  not  merely  fruitful  in  follies.  It  ends  by  being  a 
deterioration  of  the  heart,  which  withers  and  fades, 
as  does  the  most  brilliant  complexion,  under  a  daily 
regime  of  dinners  and  balls.  What  proves  this  is  that 
Reine's  mother  kept  her  word.  By  one  of  those  anoma- 
lies of  conscience  which  we  observe  but  cannot  explain, 
she  will  not  pardon  in  her  daughter  a  happiness  which 
she  persists  in  regarding  as  the  most  abominable  in- 
gratitude. In  this  social  campaign,  entered  upon  for 
the  purpose  of  winning  and  maintaining  what  she  calls 
"a  position  in  the  world,"  she  thinks  of  her  daughter 
with  sentiments  akin  to  those  which  Napoleon  must 
have  felt  when  he  saw  the  Saxons  go  over  to  the  enemy 
on  the  battle-field  of  Leipsic.  But  no  more  than  the 
emperor  was  is  she  one  of  those  wills  that  yield;  and 
you  will  see  her,  if  you  yourself  are  a  slave  to  the 
deadly  tasks  of  All-Paris,  continuing  alone  to  meet  its 
least  requirements,  to  perform  its  least  rites,  aimless, 


276  OTHER  people's  luxury 

now  that  the  establishment  of  her  daughter  is  no  longer 
her  object,  and  hopeless  —  for  honour's  sake !  Her 
name  figures  this  morning  in  the  "  Society  Notes "  of 
the  various  journals  of  snobbism,  among  those  who  have 
sent  presents  on  the  occasion  of  a  fashionable  marriage, 
such  as  she  hoped  Eeine  would  make:  "M.  and  Mme. 
Le  Prieux,  a  crystal  and  gold  box."  It  figured 
yesterday  under  the  same  heading  and  in  the  same 
column  of  the  same  journals,  among  the  list  of  guests 
at  a  "  very  elegant  dinner  given  by  Mme,  de  Bonnivet  at 
her  handsome  residence  in  the  rue  d'Artois.  The  stair- 
case of  carved  wood  (a  marvel  of  art),  the  salon,  and 
the  dining  room  (also  a  marvel)  were  adorned  with 
flowers  and  potted  plants,  the  •  powdered  footmen  in 
livery  d,  la  frangaise."  You  also  saw  it,  this  same  name, 
day  before  yesterday,  always  in  the  same  place  in  the 
same  newspapers,  in  the  account  of  a  concert  given  for 
a  charitable  object,  —  in  which  the  excellent  Duchess 
de  Contay  is  interested,  —  under  the  consecrated  head- 
ing, "Among  those  present  we  noticed,  etc."  And,  on 
a  recent  evening,  if  you  were  at  the  Theatre-Franqais, 
on  the  occasion  of  the  first  performance  of  Kene 
Vincy's  poetic  drama,  "Hannibal,"  so  hotly  discussed, 
you  saw  Mme.  Le  Prieux  enthroned  in  the  baignoire 
at  the  right  which  has  been  for  many  years  allotted 
to  the  celebrated  dramatic  critic.  She  sat  in  front 
with  the  young  Countess  de  Bee-Crispin,  and  she  was 
more  bejewelled,  more  tightly  laced,  more   elaborately 


OTHER  people's  LUXURY  277 

costumed  —  in  short,  more  the  "  beautiful  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  "  —  than  ever.  And  if,  by  any  chance,  you  could 
have  listened  to  the  remarks  made  in  the  baignoire  oppo- 
site, by  the  Molans  and  the  Fauriels,  who  were  also 
there  for  the  purpose  of  keeping  their  rank  among 
"Parisian  personalities,"  you  would  have  heard  this 
world  of  all  artifices  and  all  displays  judge,  by  the 
mouth  of  two  very  pretty  women  and  the  two  crafty 
artists,  their  husbands,  the  heroic  labours  of  this  vet4- 
rane  of  this  sacred  battalion. 

"  She  is  marvellous,  Mme.  Le  Prieux,"  Laurence 
Fauriel  said.  "  I  never  saw  her  more  beautiful  than 
she  is  this  evening.  Mme.  de  Bee-Crispin  actually  looks 
older  than  she  does.  Certainly  there  are  lucky  hus- 
bands! Look  at  that  Le  Prieux, — common  as  a  man  can 
be,  and  a  bore,  and  no  talent,  —  he  marries  the  Venus 
of  Milo,  and  she  is  a  good  woman,  who  has  never  been 
talked  about  —  " 

"And  will  get  him  into  the  Academy  some  day," 
said  Marie  Molan.     "  Don't  you  think  so,  Jacques  ?  " 

"  Why,  certainly,"  replied  the  playwright-novelist. 
"  He  sounded  me  only  the  other  day  as  to  my  intentions, 
in  a  way  that  showed  he  was  thinking  of  it  himself. 
That  is  the  reason  why  he  has  just  published  that 
poor  stuff  that  he  calls  his  '  Souvenirs.'  There  must 
be  at  least  one  book,  to  give  that  energetic  wife  of  his 
the  shadow  of  a  shade  of  pretext.  She  is  capable  of 
recruiting  fifteen  votes  for  him  —  and  he  such  a  bor§ ! 


278  OTHER  people's  luxury 

What  a  nice  woman  she  is,  though ;  and  what  a  pity- 
she  should  be  handicapped  like  that!" 

"She  is  fichtrement  belle,  all  the  same,"  observed 
Fauriel,  whose  aspect  of  a  gentleman  having  a  London 
tailor  has  never  been  able  to  cure  him  of  studio  slang  — 
unless,  indeed,  that  is  his  way  of  making  himself  pleas- 
ing to  the  fashionable  ladies  whose  portraits  he  paints. 
And,  with  his  artistic  eye,  he  analyzed  Mme.  Le  Prieux 
through  his  opera-glass.  "  Such  a  beautiful  outline  of 
head !  And  how  it  is  set  on  the  neck !  What  a  curve  of 
the  frontal  arch !  How  that  woman  is  built !  At  sixty 
—  at  seventy,  if  she  doesn't  grow  fat,  she  will  still  be 
superb.  It  is  in  the  blood !  Her  daughter  was  so 
pretty  ;  what  became  of  her  ?  " 

"  She  is  living  in  the  south ;  she  married  that  young 
cousin  we  used  to  see  sometimes  at  their  house,"  re- 
joined Laurence  Fauriel;  "it  was  an  absurd  marriage 
and  a  great  grief  to  the  mother  —  a  rash  act,  that  the 
silly  girl  must  be  sorry  enough  for  by  this  time.  She 
was  in  Paris  a  few  days  last  autumn.  I  met  her.  She 
is  as  pretty  as  ever ;  but  it  is  quite  plain  that  Mme.  Le 
Prieux  no  longer  sees  to  her  gowns." 

"  Reine  in  Paris  for  some  days,  and  you  did  not 
tell  me!"  exclaimed  Mme.  Molan.  "And  she  did  not 
come  to  see  me !     That  was  not  nice  of  her." 

"Nor  me  either,"  rejoined  Mme.  Fauriel;  "she  has 
none  too  much  heart.  I  am  not  sure  that  she  even 
loves  her  mother.     If  she  had  loved  her,  why  did  she 


OTHER   people's   LUXURY  279 

not  marry  here,  among  her  mother's  circle  of  acquaint- 
ances ?     And  such  an  excellent  mother,  too  ! " 

"  The  girl  was  probably  envious  of  her,"  said  Jacques 
Molan,  by  way  of  concluding  the  subject.  This  writer, 
always  an  imitator,  this  finished  type  of  the  arriviste 
and  prqfiteur,  whom  we  have  known  in  his  novels  and 
plays  as  successively  naturalistic,  psychological,  con- 
cerned with  fashionable  life,  then  with  eroticism,  then 
with  social  questions,  appears  to  have  adopted  definitively 
that  tone  of  the  superior  scoffer  who  tranquilly  observes 
the  infamy  of  human  nature.  He  made  no  account  of 
his  remark,  as  if  this  were  in  the  current  order,  and 
then,  with  another  glance  at  the  baignoire  of  the 
Le  Prieux,  he  added,  "Besides,  the  girl  might  take 
after  her  father.  —  Ladies,"  he  continued,  "  let  us 
follow  the  play ;  it  is  probably  very  good  just  now,  for 
that  old  hack  of  a  Le  Prieux  pretends  to  be  absent 
and  pay  no  attention." 

And  absent  he  was,  in  truth,  the  husband  of  the 
"beautiful  Mme.  Le  Prieux,"  so  justly  named  an  "old 
hack  "  by  one  of  the  masters  of  the  realistic  school,  him- 
self so  magnanimous,  so  considerate,  so  indulgent  to 
other  men's  talent !  Hector  was,  indeed,  hundreds  of 
miles  away  from  the  baignoire  where  his  wife  enjoyed 
her  triumph,  and  from  the  one  where  these  remarks 
were  interchanged  between  these  two  poor  mercantis  of 
art  and  their  wives  —  leagues  and  leagues  distant  from 
the  scene  where  soulless  actors  were  delivering  before 


280  OTHER   people's   LUXURY 

this  blas^  public  the  skilfully  fabricated  lines  of  the 
most  famous  of  the  poetic  carpenters  of  to-day.  The 
dramatic  critic  in  thought  was  sitting  in  the  little  salon 
of  the  mas,  watching  Eeine's  smile,  which  came  to  him 
from  far  away  —  so  sweet,  so  tender,  somewhat  sad 
because  of  their  separation,  but  so  grateful !  This  vision 
was  enough  to  send  inexpressible  happiness  through 
the  old  journalist's  veins  and  all  the  more  because  he 
observed,  when  they  entered  the  theatre  this  evening, 
that  his  wife's  beauty  again  received  the  homage  of 
admiration  which  is  still  so  precious  to  her.  With  half- 
closed  eyes,  he  sits  unmindful  of  all  the  articles  that 
he  must  write  to  complete  the  payment  of  their  debts  — 
and  there  are  still  over  three  thousand  dollars  to  be 
paid!  He  forgets  the  shower  of  hostile  notices  that 
greeted  his  modest  volume  of  "  Souvenirs,"  He  forgets 
the  arm-chair  under  the  dome,  and  the  computation  of 
the  academic  votes  with  which  Mathilde  again  occupied 
herself  on  the  way  to  the  theatre.  He  forgets  his 
weariness  over  the  worthless  page  and  his  incurable 
regret  over  abandoned  art.  He  forgets  all  —  in  the 
intense  pleasure  of  feeling  that  the  two  he  loves  are 
happy,  each  in  her  own  way,  and  that  it  is  he  who  has 
made  them  happy,  No,  his  life  has  not  been  a  failure ! 
He  was  right  in  saying  to  his  daughter,  that  he  has 
realized  his  Ideal.  He  came  to  Paris,  as  he  said,  to  be 
a  poet.  And  who  is  a  poet,  if  he  is  not  ? 
DECE3fB£B  1899  -  Februabt  1900 


in 

CHILDREN'S  HEARTS 


Ill 

CHILDREN'S  HEARTS 
I 

THE   TALISMAN 

The  story  I  am  about  to  relate  was  told  me  by  cue  of 
the  most  celebrated  artists  of  our  time,  one  also  most 
hostile  to  all  efforts  for  notoriety,  all  self-advertisement, 
all  confidential  disclosure.  I  shall  not  give  his  name,  not 
wishing  to  ask  the  permission,  which  he  would  doubtless 
refuse  me,  to  repeat  this  anecdote,  although  it  concerns 
his  very  early  youth.  I  shall  observe  the  same  reticence 
as  to  the  character  of  his  talent  —  whether  he  is  sculptor 
or  painter,  musician  or  architect,  poet  or  dramatist.  My 
absolute  silence  upon  this  point  seems  to  me  to  authorize 
a  narrative  which  carries  with  it  a  very  human  lesson, 
for  it  deals  with  the  psychology  of  childhood,  and  hence 
with  educatioual  psychology.  I  remember  that  this  was 
my  motive  in  writing  down,  as  I  did  at  once,  this  confi- 
dence —  at  some  points  puerile,  at  others  somewhat  too 
minute  in  detail  —  of  a  man  who,  as  a  rule,  very  seldom 
enters  the  confessional.     I  saw  in  it  a  proof,  and  a  strik- 


284  childeen's  hearts 

ing  one,  of  these  two  truths :  one,  that  the  evil  passions 
of  the  man  ah-eady  exist,  in  their  germ  and  ready  to 
awaken,  in  the  innocence  of  the  child ;  the  other,  that  the 
surest  remedy  against  these  precocious  vices  lies  in  the 
high-mindedness  of  the  mature  educator. 

I  will  add,  to  give  this  narration  its  exact  setting,  that 
the  artist  who  related  it  to  us  had  just  obtained  one  of 
his  most  brilliant  successes.  On  this  occasion  a  comrade 
of  his  early  days  had  basely  slandered  him  in  a  newspaper. 
He  had  been  the  first  to  mention  this  article  to  us. 
When  the  conversation  extended  itself  to  the  subject 
of  envy,  that  odious  passion  which  is  the  professional 
vice  of  those  who  aspire  to  fame,  we  all  began  denying, 
more  or  less  sincerely,  that  we  had  ever  experienced  it, 
when,  to  our  great  surprise,  our  comrade,  whom  we  knew 
to  be  so  generous  in  his  renown,  so  enthusiastic  as  to 
his  rivals'  talent,  so  remote  from  the  meanness  of  petty 
rivalries,  interrupted  us  by  saying,  "Well,  as  for  me,  I 
was  born  envious,  I  may  as  well  confess  it.  And  it  is 
just  that  fact  which  makes  me  indulgent  toward  such 
fellows  as  — "  naming  his  defamer.  "When  I  read  a 
thing  like  that  and  am  on  the  point  of  being  angry,  I 
remind  myself  of  a  shameful  act  I  once  committed  my- 
self, thi"ough  envy ;  and  if  I  had  not  then  met,  to  make 
me  ashamed  of  it,  one  of  those  right-minded  persons 
whom  you  never  can  forget,  who  can  tell  to  what  a 
height  this  vile  instinct  of  hatred  at  sight  of  another's 
happiness  would  have  grown  within  me!     I  will  not 


children's  hearts  285 

make  myself  out  any  better  than  I  am.  I  find  this 
instinct  still  in  the  depths  of  my  soul  at  wicked  minutes. 
And  I  go  home,  and  I  look  at  a  talisman  that  this  man 
left  me.  Here  it  is,"  he  added,  pointing  to  a  bronze 
statuette  on  his  writing-table,  which  served  at  the  time 
as  a  paper-weight.  "It  is  a  Hermes,  as  you  see,  the 
Psychopomp,  Leader  of  Souls.  His  gesture  and  his  cadu- 
ceus  indicate  this.  You  shall  see  that,  for  me,  he  is  well 
named.  It  is  probably  a  Roman  reproduction  of  a  rather 
fine  Greek  original.  For  thirty-nine  years  I  have  always 
had  this  bibelot  with  me,  and  I  am  now  fifty  years  old, 
which  shows  that  the  base  act  of  which  I  am  thus  forever 
reminded  dates  back  to  my  eleventh  year."  We  were 
amazed  at  this  date,  which  contrasted  too  violently  with 
the  severity  of  the  language  our  comrade  had  used.  He 
replied  by  a  confession  that  I  give  in  his  own  words,  un- 
changed except  by  the  omission  of  two  or  three  details 
which  would  designate  too  clearly  the  scene  and  the 
hero  of  this  childish  tragedy;  and  may  he  pardon 
this  indiscretion  of  his  friend  and  listener ! 


As  I  have  just  said  to  you,  the  souvenirs  evoked 
for  me  by  this  little  bronze  are  connected  with  my 
early  childhood,  that  is  to  say,  with  the  years  immedi- 
ately following  the  establishment  of  the  Empire.  I 
was  living  at  that    time    in  a    little    city  of  central 


286  children's  hearts 

France,  which  had  distinguished  itself  by  its  Republi- 
can fervour  in  1848.  It  distinguished  itself  by  its 
Bonapartist  fervour  in  1855,  to  the  extreme  indigna- 
tion of  a  few  persons,  of  which  number  was  the 
uncle  who  had  charge  of  my  education.  This  maternal 
uncle  taught  mathematics  in  the  Faculte  of  the  little 
city.  He  was  unmarried,  and  my  parents,  living  in 
the  country,  had  intrusted  me  to  him  under  the 
avowed  pretext  that  he  shoiild  superintend  my  studies ; 
but  really  with  the  secret  hope  that  later  he  would 
make  me  his  heir.  This  excellent  man  who,  as  the 
saying  is,  would  not  have  hurt  a  fly,  was  an  ardent 
Jacobin,  in  whom  the  Revolution  of  February  had  ex- 
cited a  real  frenzy  of  hope;  and  the  coup  d'etat  of 
the  second  of  December  —  that  healthful  sewerage 
scheme  which  we  all  dream  of  —  had  struck  him  like 
a  personal  misfortune.  I  smile  when  I  remember 
the  amazing  conversations  to  which  I  listened,  baby 
that  I  was,  between  this  dear  uncle  and  his  friends, 
worthy  professors  like  himself  for  the  most  part, 
who,  being  burdened  with  families  or  else  merely 
enamoured  of  their  profession,  had  been  obliged  to 
take  oath  under  the  new  regime  and  swear  fealty  to 
the  tyrant !  They  avenged  themselves  for  this  harm- 
less formality  by  calling,  in  classic  wise,  a  Tiberius 
and  a  Nero,  the  easy-going  Caesar  who  at  that  time 
dreamed  at  the  Tuileries.  They  extolled  as  prophets 
all  the  dangerous  or  grotesque  Utopians  Qt  revolution- 


children's  hearts  287 

ary  socialism:  the  Fouriers,  the  Saint  Simons,  the 
Proudhons,  the  Louis  Blancs.  These  pedagogues,  these 
functionaries,  these  townsfolk,  lamented  that  the  Feb- 
ruary government  had  been  deficient  in  Terrorist  en- 
ergy— meanwhile  placidly  correcting  exercises,  if  they 
taught  in  the  lycee,  or  superintending  baccalaureate  ex- 
aminations, if  in  the  Faculte.  At  the  time,  my  childish 
imagination,  nourished  upon  the  De  Viris,  made  me 
regard  these  words  as  sublime,  and  these  characters 
as  grand.  Their  pathetic  comedy  amuses  me  at  this 
distance,  as  I  recall  them  one  after  another  — 
the  associate  professor  of  history,  M.  Andre,  known 
as  the  Barbarian,  on  account  of  the  thesis  on  Theo- 
dora which  he  was  preparing;  his  namesake,  M. 
Andre,  the  physicist,  called  Andre  phi,  to  distinguish 
him  from  the  other;  M.  Martin,  the  Hellenist,  disre- 
spectfully called  "the  Idler."  I  see  especially  my 
old  uncle's  alter  ego,  Dr.  Leon  Pacotte,  professor  of 
obstetrics  in  the  medical  Faculte  —  the  man  from 
whom  I  received  this  talisman  against  envy,  this  little 
Hermes,  "Leader  of  So\ils." 

This  old  doctor,  an  old  man  then,  —  he  was  seventy 
at  that  time,  —  remains  in  my  memory  a  whimsical  fig- 
ure—  so  long  and  lean  he  was,  with  a  hatchet  face, 
which  an  endless  nose  bestridden  by  round-eyed  spec- 
tacles would  have  rendered  a  very  caricature  had  it 
not  been  for  the  look  in  his  eyes,  which  were  black, 
in  a  pale,  almost  bloodless  face.      Such  power  of  will 


288  children's  hearts 

emanated  from  them,  such  intellect  also,  and  such 
goodness,  that  merely  to  meet  those  brilliant  eyes 
froze  the  mocking,  boyish  laugh  ujjon  my  lips.  His 
pallid  skin,  his  narrow,  bony  shoulders,  the  emacisr 
tion  of  his  body  and  limbs,  betrayed  in  the  old  man 
a  feeble  temperament,  kept  alive  by  a  miracle  of 
regime.  He  lived  to  boast  of  both.  How  often  I 
have  heard  him  say, — 

"Dupuytren,  my  teacher,  gave  me  up  as  phthisic 
•when  he  took  me  as  interne  in  my  twenty-first  year. 
I  buried  him  in  1835.  Broussais,  the  great  Broussais, 
agreed  in  this  diagnosis.  I  buried  him  in  1838. 
Orpila  said  the  same.     I  buried  him  in  1853." 

And  he  would  laugh  quietly,  with  the  sarcastio 
laugh  of  the  old  practitioner  vaunting  the  superiorities 
of  his  own  method.  How  did  this  excellent  man  rec- 
oncile such  strange,  grave-digger's  joy  at  his  own 
survival,  with  his  tenderness  of  heart,  his  ardent  devo- 
tion in  friendship  ?  Let  him  solve  this  problem  who 
can.  As  for  me,  I  feel  to  this  day  the  little  shiver 
that  ran  through  me  when  he  would  lay  his  big 
doctor's  hand  upon  my  shorn  schoolboy  head,  his 
bony  fingers  exhaling  that  surgical  odour  that  no 
amount  of  soap  ever  entirely  dissipates,  —  that  musty 
hospital  smell "  comjDounded  of  iodine  and  aromatic 
wine  and  phenol  and  chloroform  all  combined,  —  and 
his  old  experience  would  begin  to  indoctrinate  my  youth- 
ful thoughtlessness. 


children's  hearts  289 

"  You  are  like  your  grandfather,"  he  would  say ; 
"  I  knew  him  well.  He  was  cut  out  to  live  a  century. 
He  never  would  listen  to  me.  I  used  to  say  to  him : 
the  stomach  is  the  arsenal  of  the  body ;  eat  at  regular 
hours ;  never  read  after  eating ;  take  exercise.  He 
laughed  at  me.  I  buried  him  in  1847.  Take  warning. 
Look  at  me ;  I  have  only  one  lung ;  I  have  been 
given  up  as  incurable,  and  I  was  incurable.  I  am 
alive  now  because  I  was  determined  to  live,  and  I 
took  pains.  I  measured  the  capacity  of  my  thorax, 
and  now  these  fifty-five  years,  listen  to  me,  I  take 
at  each  meal  just  the  correct  weight  of  food  that  the 
digestive  muscles  may  not  have  to  work  to  excess.  And 
30  in  other  things." 

And  it  was  true  that  this  astonishing  regularity  of 
habits  made  him  a  figure  of  the  most  picturesque  origi- 
nality. I  can  see  now  the  sunny  dining  room  where 
my  uncle  and  I  would  pay  him  an  unexpected  visit 
now  and  then,  after  his  breakfast  or  his  dinner.  On 
the  sideboard  were  seven  little  vials  in  a  row,  corked 
with  especial  care,  into  which  he  poured  every  Monday 
just  the  quantity  of  old  Bordeaux  which  he  should  use 
for  the  week.  I  see  him,  crossing  his  interminable  legs, 
and  under  his  turned-up  trousers  the  thick  leather  of  the 
heavy  boots  which  he  constantly  wore,  for  fear  of  the 
dampness.  In  winter  he  wore,  outside  of  the  boots, 
clogs,  whose  wooden  soles  clacked  on  the  stone  steps  of 
our  staircase,  when  he  came  to  visit  us.     I  can  still  hear, 


290  children's  hearts 

after  all  these  years,  the  old  doctor's  automatic  step.  I 
see  his  long,  brown  coat  with  its  velvet  collar,  the  form 
and  colour  unvaried  throughout  my  childhood,  his  eter- 
nal white  cravat,  rolled  twice  around  his  long  neck, 
above  which  appeared  the  two  round  corners  of  his  shirt- 
collar,  his  tall  hat,  lustreless  and  broad-brimmed,  and 
the  knitted  mittens  that  he  wore  over  his  leather  gloves. 
And,  especially,  I  see  the  salon,  where,  on  Sunday 
afternoon,  there  met  a  real  club  of  free-thinkers  and 
Jacobins,  consisting  of  my  uncle,  the  professors  hostile 
to  the  Empire,  and  a  few  lawyers,  landowners,  and  gen- 
tlemen of  means,  who  shared  the  radicalism  of  the  mas- 
ter of  the  house.  Again,  how  mysterious  that  this  ju- 
dicious hygienist,  all  observation  and  all  realism,  should 
profess  in  politics  doctrines  the  most  contrary  to  experi- 
ence !  I  have  observed  this  phenomenon  so  many  times 
in  the  case  of  other  doctors  that  I  ought  not  to  be  sur- 
prised at  it  any  longer,  and  yet  I  always  am  surprised. 
This  anomaly  was  the  more  remarkable  in  the  case  of 
Dr.  Pacotte,  because  this  irreconcilable  hater  of  kings 
and  priests,  this  frantic  admirer  of  the  fanatics  of  the 
convention,  who  spoke  of  Danton,  Saint  Just,  and  Robes- 
pierre, that  triumvirate  of  sanguinary  brigands,  with 
idolatry,  was,  at  the  same  time,  an  ardent  lover  of  old 
France,  an  amateur  and  enthusiastic  collector  of  all 
precious  debris  of  ancient  times  scattered  through  our 
province.  His  salon  was  crowded  with  treasures  that 
he  bequeathed  to  the  municipality,  making  the  museum 


childken's  hearts  291 

of  this  little  provincial  city  one  of  the  richest  in  our 
country.  It  was  there  that  my  boyish  eyes  were  first 
caressed  by  the  warm,  brilliant  colours  of  Limoges 
enamels.  The  doctor  had  fifteen  plaques,  representing 
scenes  of  the  Passion,  all  of  the  best  period,  that  of  the 
high  altar  of  Grandmont,  with  those  beautiful  grounds 
the  colour  of  lapis  lazuli,  those  draperies  of  a  soft  water- 
green,  that  red-brown  of  hair  and  beard  framing  the 
soft  flesh  tint  of  the  faces.  Where  did  he  discover  this 
treasure  ?  No  one  knows.  Where,  those  magnificent 
episcopal  chairs  carved  by  some  fine  Burgundian  artist 
of  the  fifteenth  century  ?  Where,  those  panels  of 
painted  wood  that  the  piety  of  some  noble  in  the  reign 
of  Charles  VIII  must  have  brought  back  from  Italy  ? 
Where,  that  tapestry  which  perhaps  had  adorned  the 
tent  of  one  of  the  followers  of  Charles  the  Bold?  He 
was  reticent  about  his  purchases,  as  a  true  lover  about 
his  lady's  favours.  Moreover,  researches  in  one  of 
Caesar's  camps,  in  our  neighbourhood,  had  given  him 
an  interest  in  Roman  things,  and  a  glass  case  contained 
a  quantity  of  small  objects  in  bronze,  turned  green  by 
the  passage  of  time,  gold  jewels  friable  and,  as  it  were, 
bleached  out  by  use,  discoloured  pottery,  rings  with 
combats  engraved  on  the  stone,  heads  of  terra-cotta 
statuettes,  in  short,  a  mass  of  bibelots,  some  extremely 
rare,  among  which  once  figured  this  Hermes  —  you  shall 
hear  in  what  circumstances,  and  also  why  it  did  not 
remain  in  the  collection. 


292  children's  hearts 

II 

It  was  in  this  familiar  salon,  and  in  the  afternoon  of 
a  fine  October  Sunday,  that  I  met  for  the  first  time  the 
being  who  was  destined  to  inspire  me  with  this  passion 
of  envy  in  all  its  unjust  wrath  —  a  passion  that  seems 
even  more  than  commonly  hateful  in  a  child.  It  is 
explained,  it  is  almost  excused  in  some  unhappy  creature 
who,  in  old  age,  takes  revenge  for  fate's  humiliations 
by  insulting  the  happiness  of  others.  But  a  child  ? 
Well,  I  believe  from  my  ovm  experience  that  a  child 
can  be  envious  of  another  child  as  a  grown  man  is 
envious  of  another  man,  with  the  same  savage  irrita- 
tion in  the  presence  of  advantages  which  he  does  not 
possess.  You  will  judge  as  to  this.  I  have  still  before 
my  eye  the  autumnal  colouring  of  that  radiant  October 
Sunday,  when  I  first  was  seized  by  this  evil  feeling. 
The  vision  of  it  is  all  blue  and  tawny  —  the  in- 
tense azure  of  the  sky,  and,  relieved  against  it,  in 
warm  brown  masses,  the  foliage,  already  withered  but 
still  intact,  of  the  chestnut  trees  of  the  promenade.  My 
uncle  had  taken  me  with  him,  as  usual,  to  Dr.  Pacotte's 
house.  I  knew  that  an  event  was  to  occur  there  that 
afternoon  which  these  gentlemen  considered  important : 
the  presentation  to  them  of  a  personage  whose  name  even 
to-day  is  probably  not  quite  unknown  —  a  M.  Montescot, 
author  of  two  or  three  carefully  studied  articles  upon 
public  instruction  under  the  old  regime.     At  that  period 


children's  hearts  298 

this  man  enjoyed  a  species  of  fame  in  the  little  univer- 
sity world  in  which  I  lived.  He  had,  at  the  time  of  the 
coup  d'itat,  given  in  his  resignation  with  all  possible 
publicity,  and  quitted  the  chair  of  philosophy  which  he 
held,  though  a  very  young  man,  in  the  lycee  Louis-le- 
Grand  in  Paris,  after  an  address  of  protest  delivered  to 
his  pupils.  This  tirade  would  have  consigned  him  to 
prison,  if  the  imperial  government  had  been  the  tyranny 
that  my  uncle  and  his  friends  stigmatized  weekly  among 
the  radical  doctor's  bibelots.  Instead  of  this,  his  dis- 
missal sufficed,  Montescot  was  a  native  of  our  town. 
He  had  distant  cousins  there,  of  the  same  name  with 
himself.  It  was  quite  natural  that  he  should  return 
thither.  But  for  maniacs  of  persecution,  like  the 
habitues  of  the  Pacotte  salon,  this  arrival  of  the  dis- 
missed philosopher  became  at  once  some  dark  machina- 
tion of  the  nation's  oppressors. 

"  They  prevent  him  from  earning  his  bread  in  Paris," 
solemnly  remarked  M.  Andre,  the  Barbarian ;  "  ah !  the 
brigands  ! "  then  added  in  a  tone  of  mystery,  "  Fortu- 
nately Tacitus  already  lives  in  the  Empire."  This 
quotation,  which  frequently  recurred  in  the  worthy 
man's  talk,  signified  that  the  Professor  of  History  was 
preparing  an  essay  on  the  Twelve  Caesars,  full  of  the 
severest  allusions  to  the  present  regime. 

"  They  feared  his  eloquence,"  replied  Andre  phi,  a 
comrade  of  Montescot  at  the  £cole  Normale.  This 
brotherhood   with   the    martyr    gave   him    importance. 


294  children's  hearts 

"If  you  had  heard  him  speak!  At  the  school,  we 
were  not  suspected,  we  scientific  students,  of  a  partiality 
for  the  students  of  literature,  and  especially  for  the 
philosophers.  We  used  to  call  them  chatterers.  But 
he !  Ah,  he ! "  and  seeking  a  term  of  comparison,  the 
physicist,  who  in  all  history  knew  only  the  Revolution, 
added,  thinking  to  decree  a  wreath  to  his  friend,  "He 
is  a  Vergniaud !  " 

"  They  will  be  punished,"  interrupted  my  uncle,  whose 
Republican  convictions,  exalted  spiritual  nature,  and 
constant  astronomical  studies  had  fused  themselves  into 
a  marvellously  imaginative  conception  of  the  migration 
of  souls  to  the  stars.  Each  would  inhabit  an  inferior 
or  a  superior  star,  according  to  his  virtues ;  and  the 
gentle  savant  conscientiously  peopled  with  virtuous 
Jacobins  the  plains  of  Jupiter,  where  reigns  an  eternal 
springtime,  and  with  infamous  reactionaries  the  regions, 
torrid  or  glacial,  of  Venus,  which  has  no  temperate  zone. 
"Yes,"  he  continued,  "they  will  be  punished,  on  this 
planet  or  another,  and  Montescot  will  be  rewarded. 
The  Absolute  cannot  but  be  right." 

"Meanwhile,"  concluded  Dr.  Pacotte,  who,  while  a 
good  Republican,  was  even  a  better  materialist,  "since 
we  are  neither  in  Jupiter  nor  in  Saturn,  and  since 
the  Absolute  would  not  concern  itself  with  keeping 
Montescot  in  food,  I  propose,  to-morrow,  to  seek  pupils 
for  him  among  my  patients.  Is  your  friend  married  ?  " 
And  on  the  negative  reply  of  M.  Andre  phi,  "  Then  we 


children's  hearts  295 

will  make  life  very  easy  for  him,  in  spite  of  prefect, 
rector,  and  police.  You  will  bring  him  to  me  as  soon 
as  he  arrives,  will  you  not,  Andre  ?  If  they  thought 
they  should  bring  him  down  by  persecution,  they  will 
find  they  were  mistaken ! " 

After  talk  like  this,  do  I  need  to  explain  what  a  place, 
in  my  childish  dreams,  was  at  once  taken  by  this  modem 
Cato,  this  contemporary  Thrasea,  this  Seneca  of  Louis- 
le-Grand,  pursued  by  those  mysterious  torturers,  whom 
I  imagined  as  presided  over  by  the  executioner-in-chief, 
poor  Napoleon  III,  whose  benign  face,  seen  on  coins, 
bewildered  me  a  little,  certainly  —  child  though  I  was. 
But  I  had,  for  my  uncle  and  his  friends,  a  foolishly 
credulous  respect  that  outweighed  evidence.  And  then, 
strange  as  this  aberration  may  appear,  these  worthy 
men  were  perfectly  sincere  in  believing  themselves 
crushed  by  a  regime  that  left  them  thus  free  of  opinion 
and  of  speech.  As  the  sincerity  of  grown  persons 
acts  in  the  most  contagious  manner  upon  the  young, 
when  the  arrival  of  the  proscribed  Montescot  was 
announced  for  the  coming  Sunday,  I  passed  the  week 
in  a  real  fever  of  imaginative  expectation.  It  must 
be  that  this  was  a  very  strong  habit  in  my  character; 
for  I  have  felt  almost  the  same  feverish  impatience  and 
ardour  every  time  in  my  life  when  I  have  been  expect- 
ing to  meet  a  person  whose  talent  I  admired,  and 
almost  every  time  I  have  felt  the  same  sudden  dis- 
appointment which  was  inflicted  upon  me  at  the  house 


296  childeen's  hearts 

of  Dr.  Pacotte,  when  the  man  entered   around  whose 
brow  I  had  distinctly  seen  the  martyr's  halo. 

M.  Montescot  was  a  man  of  thirty-five,  who  looked 
forty-five,  with  a  pensive,  pitiful  face  which  showed 
the  suffering  caused  by  enfeebled  health.  He  was 
short,  with  bent  shoulders,  and  he  was  already  bald. 
An  invincible  timidity  gave  awkwardness  to  his  every 
movement,  still  further  augmented  by  very  marked 
myopia,  and  the  eye-glasses  which  he  wore  were  always 
insecure  upon  his  very  short  nose.  I  have  since  heard 
that  there  was  a  little  Russian  blood  in  his  veins, 
and  he  had  in  fact  that  half-Asiatic  type  of  face,  broad 
and  somewhat  flat,  which  is  so  often  found  among  the 
Slavs.  But  the  physicist  who  was  his  introducer, 
after  having  been  his  herald,  had  told  the  truth:  this 
pitiable  face  became  transfigured  when  the  man  spoke. 
Nature,  so  capricious  in  the  distribution  of  her  powers, 
had  given  him  the  organ  of  a  great  orator,  one  of 
those  enchanting  voices  which  are  a  music  to  the  ear, 
and  irresistibly  persuasive  in  their  fascination.  There 
lay  the  absolute  superiority  of  this  incomplete  man. 
This  also  must  have  been  the  reason  of  his  inefficiency. 
The  long  years  of  his  exile,  which  might  have  been 
fruitfid,  were  to  be  passed  in  the  comitry,  talking 
instead  of  writing,  overflowing  in  interminable  talk,  at 
my  uncle's  house,  at  the  house  of  Dr.  Pacotte,  wherever 
his  audience  vibrated  in  sympathy,  instead  of  preparing 
himself  by  strenuous  study  for  the  almost  certain  return 


children's  hearts  297 

to  power  of  his  party.  But  it  was  only  later  that 
the  personality  of  Montescot  was  thus  outlined  in 
my  thoughts;  at  the  moment  I  had  only  a  confused 
impression  of  disappointment,  immediately  dominated 
and  driven  out  by  another,  of  astonishment,  interest, 
and  curiosity.  The  newcomer  led  by  the  hand  a  boy, 
evidently  of  just  my  age,  whose  existence  had  never 
been  mentioned  in  the  conversations  that  had  gone  on 
around  me  in  the  last  few  days. 

"I  take  the  liberty  to  bring  with  me  ray  ward,"  he 
said  simply  to  Dr.  Pacotte,  "  not  to  leave  him  alone  at 
home." 

"And  you  did  right,"  the  doctor  replied;  "he  will 
have  a  little  comrade.     What  is  his  name  ?  " 

"My  name  is  Octave,"  said  the  boy  himself. 

"  Very  well.  Octave,"  replied  our  host,  laying  the 
boy's  hand  upon  my  arm.  "Here  is  a  little  fellow 
with  whom  you  will  make  a  pair  of  friends.  Go  play  in 
the  garden." 


in 

What  family  tie  united  the  charming  boy,  who  at 
once  went  down  with  me  into  the  doctor's  great  garden, 
to  the  expelled  professor  who  presented  him  to  us  as 
his  ward  ?  Certain  details  occur  to  me  now  which  lead 
me  to  believe  that  this  self -announced  guardianship 
concealed  the  fact  of  paternity.     Though  Octave  was 


298  children's  hearts 

as  graceful  and  distinguished  as  M.  Montescot  was 
awkward  and  clumsy,  there  were  marked  resemblances 
between  them:  the  colour  of  the  eyes,  which  was  the 
same  in  both,  a  very  light  blue,  almost  gray;  that  of 
the  hair,  a  reddish  blond;  the  slightly  flattened  form 
of  the  face ;  and  the  voice  especially,  with  very  similar, 
almost  identical  intonation.  And  still,  if  the  boy  was, 
as  I  think,  the  son  of  the  philosopher,  he  was  illegiti- 
mate, and  once  again  passion  had  wrought  this  miracle 
of  a  transfigured  heredity.  All  the  mother's  grace  must 
have  passed  into  the  child.  What  mother?  How 
could  this  man,  of  high  intellectual  qualities,  but  so 
very  unattractive,  have  found  a  mistress  who  could 
have  given  him  a  son  of  such  beauty?  What  had 
become  of  her?  Why  had  not  this  disciple  of  Kant 
made  her  his  wife  ?  To  these  enigmas  no  answer  was 
ever  given.  It  is  probable  that  this  woman's  death 
had  been  coincident  with  Montescot's  return  into  the 
country,  obligingly  attributed  to  imperial  tyranny  by 
my  uncle  and  his  friends.  I  must  do  justice  to  these 
good  people,  in  whom  political  fanaticism  was  a  form 
of  simple-mindedness  —  if  they  suspected  that  M.  Mon- 
tescot was  not  speaking  the  truth  in  introducing  his 
ward  as  an  orphan,  a  distant  relative  of  his  own,  they 
never  allowed  themselves  to  speak  of  it,  even  to  each 
other.  Yes,  they  were  good  people ;  and  as  I  think  of 
them,  I  see  what  a  strong  and  substantial  France  this  old 
provincial  bourgeoisie  would  yet  give  us,  had  not  the 


childeen's  hearts  299 

revolutionary  error,  within  the  last  century,  misdirected 
the  action  of  so  many  virtues ! 

But  I  return  to  this  October  afternoon  in  the  doctor's 
garden.  It  was  a  kind  of  park,  half  uncultivated,  and 
enclosed  by  walls.  It,  as  well  as  the  house,  had 
once  belonged  to  a  Capuchin  monastery,  suppressed 
near  the  end  of  the  last  century.  The  old  doctor  re- 
tained this  ground  —  from  the  same  hygienic  motives 
which  actuated  all  his  conduct  —  on  account  of  its 
exposure  to  the  sun  and  its  fine  tall  trees,  whose  faded 
foliage,  on  that  Sunday  afternoon,  made  a  fairy  scene 
of  crimson  and  gold.  Just  as  we  reached  the  flight  of 
steps,  I  felt  a  little  impulse  of  vanity  leading  me  to 
say  to  Octave,  "Do  you  want  to  see  how  many  steps 
I  can  jump  ?"  And  with  that  I  ran  down  two  or  three 
and  leaped  the  rest.  I  looked  back  toward  my  new 
companion,  who  was  standing  at  the  top;  I  expected 
some  expression  of  surprise  from  him,  for  I  had  been 
rather  afraid  to  take  the  leap,  and  considered  myself 
very  brave  for  having  ventured  it.  Octave,  however, 
did  not  express  admiration  by  any  word  or  gesture ; 
but  with  amazement  I  beheld  him,  his  feet  close  to- 
gether, his  arms  stretched  forward  in  the  classic  atti- 
tude recommended  to  us  by  our  teacher  of  gymnastics, 
prepare  for  his  spring,  bend  his  legs  twice,  and,  at  the 
third  time,  leap  the  whole  flight.  He  had  not,  as  I 
had  done,  reduced  the  distance  by  running  down  the 
first  three  or  four  steps.     Having  accomplished  this  feat, 


300  children's  hearts 

which  was  really  a  feat  for  a  child  of  his  size  and  age, 
his  pride  manifested  itself  only  by  a  look,  to  which  I 
replied  with  the  uncontrollable  cry  of  all  wounded  van- 
ity, "  I  can  do  it,  too !  "  and  ran  up  the  steps.  Ah !  how 
long  they  looked  to  me !  But  I  met  my  companion's 
gaze,  and  I  jumped  in  my  turn.  Was  it  awkwardness 
produced  by  fear  of  failure  ?  Or  was  the  distance  really 
too  great  for  me  ?  My  feet  struck  on  the  lower  steps, 
and  instead  of  landing  upright,  I  rolled  down  upon  the 
gravel  of  the  walk,  bruised  and  bleeding,  my  trousers 
torn,  in  short,  having  had  a  fall  which  might  have 
broken  both  legs,  but  from  which  children,  like  drunken 
men,  rise  whole,  though  with  many  bruises.  Octave 
was  at  my  side  pale  with  alarm.  His  voice  trembled 
as  he  said,  "  You  haven't  hurt  yourself  ?  " 

"  Not  at  all,"  said  I,  picking  myself  up ;  and  to  prove 
the  truth  of  this  heroic  lie  I  began  running  about  in 
the  garden,  though  it  hurt  me  badly  to  move.  But  the 
humiliation  had  been  too  great,  and  a  feeling  of  real 
hatred  throbbed  in  my  heart  against  my  young  com- 
panion, whose  sweet  nature  showed  itself,  however,  in 
the  silence  that  he  maintained  as  to  the  character  of  my 
fall,  when  we  went  indoors  after  having  played  in  the 
garden  awhile,  and  I  said,  to  account  for  my  bruises  and 
the  state  of  my  clothes,  that  I  had  slipped  on  the  steps. 

"  How  do  you  like  your  new  companion  ? "  my  uncle 
asked  when  we  were  alone  —  Dr.  Pacotte,  my  uncle,  and 
I  —  after  the  departure  of  all  the  others.     This  was  also 


childben's  heaets  801 

one  of  the  Sunday  customs.  These  two  old  bachelors,  the 
mathematician  and  the  doctor,  dined,  or,  as  they  say  in 
the  country,  supped,  together  at  half-past  five,  and  they 
placed  me  at  table  between  them  like  some  little  domes- 
tic animal  whose  presence  scarcely  caused  them  a  thought. 
What  conversations  have  I  thus  heard  between  these 
two  men  who  lived  for  ideas  only — men  so  admirable 
when  they  did  not  talk  politics !  I  was  not  old  enough 
to  understand  their  superiority.  I  felt  it,  I  breathed  it 
in  like  an  atmosphere,  and  it  was  the  best,  the  most  effect- 
ual instruction.  When  one  of  my  two  elderly  friends 
spoke  to  me,  I  usually  replied  with  entire  confidence  — 
with  that  openness  of  heart  so  natural  to  a  well-treated 
child.  It  must  have  been  that  the  evil  germ  of  antipar 
thy  deposited  in  my  schoolboy  heart  by  this  first  mis- 
adventure with  the  ward  of  M.  Montescot  was  already 
germinating,  and  also  that  I  was  vaguely  conscious  of  it, 
for  I  experienced  for  the  first  time  in  my  life  an  instinc- 
tive embarrassment  in  saying  what  I  thought.  I  mum- 
bled a  few  evasive  words,  in  which  I  criticised  Octave, 
while  my  cheeks  grew  hot,  and  it  seemed  to  me  —  was 
it  an  illusion? — that  the  doctor's  look,  that  singular 
look  of  the  diagnostician,  so  acute,  so  reflective,  rested  on 
me  with  a  penetration  that  confused  me.  It  was  but  a 
flash ;  and  at  once,  to  my  uncle's  further  question,  "  You 
will  be  kind  to  him  in  school,  will  you  promise  me  ?  "  I 
replied,  "  Oh,  yes ! "  with  sudden  and  sincere  eagerness. 
How  complex  and  how  contradictory  are  these  childish 


802  children's  hearts 

feelings  that  a  prejudiced  person  believes  so  simple !  I 
felt  an  almost  physical  need  to  have  that  look,  which  I 
could  not  have  defined,  disappear  from  the  eyes  of  Dr. 
Pacotte ;  it  was  as  if  he  had  distinctly  read  in  me  some- 
thing shameful,  of  which  I  had  not  myself  been  aware. 


IV 

I  have  dwelt  upon  this  first  episode  in  my  acquaint- 
ance with  Octave  because  it  contains  the  complete 
type  of  his  character  and  mine  at  that  period  of  our 
existence.  The  little  drama  enacted  between  us  on  those 
garden  steps  was  as  the  image,  altogether  puerile  — 
our  joint  ages  amounted  to  twenty-four  years  —  of 
the  relations  of  rivalry  which  at  once  established  them- 
selves between  us.  Is  it  true  that  a  proud  boy,  feeling 
himself  in  an  exceptional  situation,  develops  exceptional 
energy  also?  I  have  often  thought  this,  in  observing 
the  efforts  of  which  very  poor  lads  are  capable.  In  no 
case  have  I  ever  seen  stronger  or  more  constant  efforts 
toward  superiority  than  in  Octave's.  He  was  a  boy  of 
only  ordinary  mental  ability  and  physical  vigour;  but 
he  had,  young  as  he  was,  a  power  of  applying  his  will  to 
the  present  action  and  a  kind  of  cool  persistency  which 
placed  him  above  all  rivalry,  in  the  matter  of  studies  as 
well  as  in  the  matter  of  sports.  He  was  even  at  that 
time  a  mature  person,  whereas  our  other  comrades  and 
myself   were   still   only  rough   sketches   of  our  future 


children's  hearts  303 

selves.  I  do  not  know  what  he  would  have  become  had 
he  lived ;  and,  indeed,  this  supposition  is  not  open  to 
consideration.  He  could  not  live  ;  maturity  is  in  all  cre- 
ation the  end,  and  Octave  from  his  eleventh  year  was  a 
matured  soul.  We  perceived  this  as  soon  as  he  entered 
our  class,  and  in  the  first  answers  that  he  gave  to  the 
master.  His  actual  knowledge  in  Latin  and  Greek  was 
no  greater  than  ours,  but  it  had  in  his  mind  and  in  his 
words  a  clearness,  precision,  and,  so  to  speak,  certainty, 
which  placed  him  at  once  in  an  exceptional  rank.  It 
was  the  same  in  his  written  work.  We  had  been  given 
for  translation  into  French  a  page  of  Livy  of  consider- 
able difficulty  for  the  class.  The  preceding  year,  I  had 
obtained  the  prize  for  translation  from  Latin,  and  I  felt 
that  the  first  place  in  this  game  was  mine  by  right.  I 
remember  it  well.  When  we  came  out  of  school,  one 
Tuesday  morning,  after  the  work  was  done,  I  asked  Oc- 
tave to  let  me  compare  his  translation  with  mine.  He 
handed  me  his  exercise-book,  containing  the  first  draft  of 
his  work,  and  its  mere  appearance  revealed  the  precocious 
manliness  of  the  boy.  The  handwriting  was  so  strong,  so 
legible,  so  finished!  The  absence  of  erasures  attested 
his  capacity  for  doing  his  work  mentally,  while  the 
rest  of  us  did  ours  with  corrections  written  in.  I  felt, 
merely  at  sight  of  the  page,  that  he  must  have  succeeded 
better  than  I.  I  read  what  he  had  written,  and  if  he 
had  not  been  there  I  should  have  wept  with  vexation 
to  find  that  in  truth  his  translation  was  far  superior  to 


804  children's  hearts 

mine.  This  vexation  rankled  in  my  heart  all  the  week 
until  Saturday,  the  day  when  the  head-master  went 
through  the  classes  announcing  the  result.  I  usually 
awaited  the  coming  of  this  formidable  authority  with 
much  anxiety.  This  anxiety  was  actually  painful  on 
that  Saturday,  and  when  he  unfolded  the  list  and 
began  to  read  it,  I  would  have  been  glad  to  escape 
from  the  great  room  where  we  stood  to  hear,  Octave  his 
victory,  for  he  was  first,  I  my  defeat,  for  I  was  only 
third ;  and  —  a  manifest  proof  that  it  was  indeed  Octave 
who  excited  my  jealousy,  he  personally — I  felt  not  the 
slightest  bitterness  toward  the  other  schoolmate  who, 
ranking  second,  had  also  defeated  me.  How  did  I  feel 
when  on  the  day  following  that  fatal  occasion,  Sunday, 
I  found  myself- with  my  fortunate  rival  in  Dr.  Pacotte's 
salon  ?  I  still  can  hear  my  uncle's  voice,  complimenting 
M.  Montescot  on  his  ward's  brilliant  debut,  as  he  said, — 

"My  nephew  has  a  strong  opponent  to  encounter,  it 
appears." 

"That  is  well,"  rejoined  M.  Andre,  the  physicist; 
"  the  schools  in  Paris  are  what  they  are  because  of  this 
competition  of  good  scholars." 

"  They  will  be  Nisus  and  Euryalus,"  remarked  M.  An- 
dr^,  the  Barbarian,  who  did  not  scorn  quotations  from 
Latin. 

"  His  amor  unus  erat,  pariterque  in  bella  ruebant.''^ 

I  knew  enough  Latin  to  translate  this  line  on  the 
friendship  of  the  two  young  Vergilian  heroes,  and  their 


children's  hearts  806 

fraternal  sympathy  in  their  strife.  But  the  feelings  in- 
spired in  me  by  the  schoolboy  Euryalus  whose  Nisus  I 
was,  according  to  the  simple-minded  professor,  were  of  a 
very  different  character.  Hardly  could  I  endure  the 
chorus  of  praises  of  which  he  was  the  object,  and  again  I 
liad  to  encounter  Dr.  Pacotte's  eyes,  fixed  upon  me  with 
that  same  surgical  acuteness,  going  to  the  very  bottom  of 
iny  conscience,  and  again  causing  me  shame.  Then, 
as  if  he  had  really  possessed  the  gift  of  reading  my 
youthful  sensitiveness  like  an  open  book,  he  said  to 
me,  — 

"  You  must  go  and  show  my  butterflies  to  your  young 
friend.  I  am  sure  he  has  not  learned  to  know  about 
them  in  Paris."  And  when  Octave  said  that  he  had  not, 
"  Explain  them  to  him,"  the  good  doctor  continued,  turn- 
ing to  me,  "you  can  do  it,  for  you  know  them  as  well 
as  I  do  myself."  He  was  aware  that  I  needed,  at  that 
moment,  some  proof  of  my  superiority  to  save  me  from 
being  overpowered  with  envious  rage;  and  he  gave 
me  the  opportunity  for  it. 


Alas !  the  trifling  gratification  afforded  to  my  suffer- 
ing egoism  by  the  old  doctor's  intelligent  kindness 
was  but  brief,  and  bad  luck  would  have  it  that  my 
uncle,  being  a  mathematician,  united  to  admirable  vir- 
tues of  heart  a  complete  lack  of  comprehension  of  human 


306  children's  hearts 

realities.  When  I  recur  in  thought  to  that  winter 
of  1855-1856,  when  this  evil  passion  of  envy  developed 
so  strangely  in  me  its  fatal  vegetation,  I  am  always  con- 
scious that  my  poor  uncle's  awkwardness  was,  unknown 
to  himself,  its  most  powerful  auxiliary.  His  familiarity 
with  the  abstract  sciences  had  given  him  in  education 
the  same  fault  as  in  polities  :  he  reasoned,  instead  of 
observing.  He  never  suspected  that  he  began  immedi- 
ately to  torture  me,  with  his  daily  eulogy  of  Octave's 
perfections  as  contrasted  with  my  faults.  He  believed 
that  he  could  thus  imj)rove  me,  and  he  did  not  j^erceive 
that,  in  proposing  to  me  as  a  model  the  very  boy  whose 
resolute  and  orderly  nature  was  most  opposed  to  my 
own,  he  plunged  me  deeper  into  my  own  faults.  I  was 
never  more  disorderly,  more  irregular,  less  painstaking 
than  during  this  period,  by  an  instinctive  reaction 
against  these  remarks,  incessantly  repeated,  "Look 
at  Octave.  Why  don't  you  keep  your  exercise-books 
like  his  ?  Why  are  you  not  as  punctual  as  he  is  ?  See 
how  neat  he  keeps  his  clothes."  And  my  uncle  in- 
creased still  further  the  disastrous  effect  of  this  con- 
stant comparison  by  testifying  for  my  little  comrade 
an  affection  which  exasperated  my  jealousy.  He  had 
formed  a  very  strong  friendship  for  M.  Montescot.  A 
philosopher  and  a  geometer  are  naturally  made  to  go 
astray  together,  and  the  two  visionaries  soon  could  not 
do  without  each  other.  Both  were  at  work  in  the  morn- 
ing and  walked  after  the  noonday  meal.     My  uncle  had 


children's  hearts  307 

been  accustomed  to  take  me  with  him,  and  these  walks 
had  been  a  delight  to  me  when  we  were  alone  with  each 
other.  They  became  a  task,  and  a  very  sad  one,  when, 
every  day,  M.  Montescot  and  his  ward  accompanied  us. 
We  usually  went  to  call  for  them,  because  they  were 
nearer  than  we  to  the  Botanic  Garden  where  we  walked 
before  the  afternoon  class.  The  dismissed  professor 
had  chosen  for  his  abode  a  little  apartment,  furnished 
dismally  with  the  few  poor  things  that  he  had  brought 
from  Paris.  The  chairs  were  few  in  the  four  rooms, 
which  had  on  their  floors  some  old  felt  carpeting  much 
worn  and  pieced.  And  yet,  the  order  and  neatness  of 
this  little  place  contrasted  with  the  wilfully  careless 
dress  of  the  metaphysician.  My  uncle  called  my  atten- 
tion to  this  neatness,  and  imparted  to  me  the  secret  of 
it.  He  had  it  from  our  maid-servant,  who  was  friendly 
with  the  housekeeper  at  the  Montescots. 

"That  little  Octave,"  he  had  said  to  me,  "is  really 
a  remarkably  good  child.  You  have  noticed  now  neat 
his  guardian's  rooms  are  ?  Every  day,  when  their 
woman  comes,  the  boy  helps  her  in  putting  them  in 
order  before  he  goes  to  the  lycee.  He  finds  time  pre- 
viously for  his  exercises  and  his  lessons.  Does  it  not 
make  you  feel  ashamed  —  you,  who  are  so  reluctant 
to  get  up  in  the  morning,  and  never  put  even  your 
own  table  in  order?" 

We  were  just  entering  this  little  apartment,  which 
I   detested.      This  very  order   of  the   furniture  was  a 


308  children's  hearts 

mute  reproach  to  my  disorder,  and  the  affectionate 
gesture  with  which  my  uncle  smoothed  the  soft  dark 
curls  of  his  "little  friend,"  as  he  used  to  say,  was 
all  the  more  intolerable  to  me  by  its  contrast  with 
the  absolute  coldness  of  M.  Montescot  toward  my- 
self. All  the  philosopher's  affection  was  concentrated 
upon  his  so-called  ward.  It  was  only  too  natural  that, 
for  him,  I  should  not  exist.  A  conversation  began 
between  the  two  men,  into  which  the  philosopher  did 
not  fail  to  introduce  some  words  in  praise  of  Octave, 
which  my  uncle  echoed;  I  saw  an  ingenuous  grati- 
tude light  up  my  comrade's  face,  and  I  envied  him 
both  the  praise  and  the  apartment.  Yet  everything 
in  it  spoke  of  poverty.  M.  Montescot  had  found  al- 
most no  pupils,  notwithstanding  Dr.  Pacotte's  efforts. 
He  made  shift  to  live  on  a  small  income,  six  or 
seven  hundred  francs,  and  his  ill-paid  labour  on  some 
of  the  vast  publishing  enterprises  which  abounded  at 
that  time.  With  these  means,  there  were  two  to  be 
fed  and  clothed,  and  the  cost  of  schooling  for  the 
boy.  The  only  luxury  in  this  abode  was  a  small  glazed 
bookcase  on  whose  shelves  were  a  few  rare  books  and 
five  or  six  objects  that  the  master  of  the  place  had 
brought  home  from  a  mission  to  Italy,  at  the  time  when 
he  was  in  favour  with  the  government.  There  were 
two  marble  heads,  a  Juno  and  a  Bacchus;  a  very  fine 
Etruscan  vase  with  black  figures  on  a  red  ground, 
representing  the   Sphinx  between  two  Thebans;    and 


children's  hearts  309 

this  bronze,  this  Hermes  Psychopompos,  at  which  I 
arrive,  as  you  see,  by  a  long  way  round.  These  an- 
tique bibelots  were  the  only  adornment  of  this  abode, 
and  their  owner's  great  joy.  M.  Montescot  was  very 
proud  of  them,  and  he  would  now  and  then  say,  in 
his  interminable  conversations  with  my  uncle  on  the 
principles  of  aesthetics,  "If  you  have  observed  my 
Sphinx  — "  or,  "You  can  see  that  in  my  Juno  — "  or, 
"  You  have  the  proof  of  that  in  my  Bacchus  —  "  or,  "  It 
is  so  in  my  Hermes."  And  he  would  smile  almost  as 
proudly  when,  on  Sundays,  at  Dr.  Pacotte's,  he  would  be 
asked,  — 

"  Well !  Octave  still  leads  ?  " 

"Yes." 

"And  how  many  times  in  succession  is  it?" 

And  the  guardian,  radiant  with  delight,  would 
reply  with  a  number  that  increased  each  week,  until 
the  Easter  vacation  came  and  with  it  the  announce- 
ment of  what  were  called  the  prizes  of  excellence.  In 
the  four  years  that  I  had  been  at  school  I  had  always 
received  the  first  prize.  This  year  I  could  only  expect 
the  second,  and  how  inferior,  after  Octave's  continuous 
successes !  He  had  failed  but  once  in  obtaining  the 
first  place.  Although  this  result,  which  was  only  an 
addition  of  points,  was  mathematical,  and  I  expected 
it  with  as  much  certainty  as  my  uncle  expected  an 
eclipse  of  the  moon  announced  by  the  Observatory,  I 
could  not  become  accustomed  to  it  or  patiently  accept 


310  children's  hearts 

this  constant  defeat.  This  evil  feeling  of  revolt  was  so 
strong  in  me  that  I  feigned  illness  to  escape  being 
present  on  the  Saturday  when  the  head-master  would 
read  the  list  of  prize  winners.  I  felt  that  I  could  not 
bear  it.  I  passed  the  whole  morning  in  my  bed,  com- 
plaining of  headache,  which  was  cured  as  if  by  magic 
when  my  uncle  spoke  of  sending  for  Dr.  Pacotte. 
I  dreaded  the  penetrating  glance  of  this  old  man,  who 
now,  as  my  odious  passion  grew  stronger,  nearly  always 
looked  at  me  with  severity.  The  scene  is  present  to  me 
as  if  it  were  of  yesterday,  for  it  was  then  that  happened 
the  evil  deed  of  which  I  spoke  to  you  —  an  act  which, 
in  the  simple  region  of  childish  feelings,  was  absolutely 
villanous.  I  can  see  myself,  as  soon  as  my  uncle  had 
mentioned  the  doctor's  name,  declaring  that  it  was  not 
worth  while  and  that  I  already  felt  better.  The  rather 
obtuse  mathematician  had  not  the  time  to  marvel  at 
this  sudden  cure,  for  just  at  the  moment  that  I  sat 
up  in  bed,  with  the  intention  of  rising,  the  bell  rang, 
quickly  and  joyfully. 

"Who  can  that  be?"  my  uncle  said.  "It  is  half- 
past  ten.  I  am  sure  it  is  Octave  coming  to  inquire 
after  you  as  soon  as  school  was  out.  He  is  such  an 
affectionate  boy,  and  he  is  so  fond  of  you!  Yes,  here 
he  comes,  and  he  has  brought  your  prize.  Nobody 
could  be  kinder." 

Octave  came  in  at  that  moment,  a  book  in  his  hand, 
the  meagre  volume  which  represented  my  second  prize, 


children's  hearts  311 

and  of  which  he  had  taken  charge.  He  had  only  gone 
home  for  a  moment  to  announce  his  success  to  M, 
Montescot,  and  he  had  under  his  arm  the  two  big 
gilt-edged  books  which  represented  his  first  prize,  from 
which  his  quite  excusable  pride  would  not  allow  him  to 
part.  But  it  was  not  the  contrast  between  his  prize  and 
mine  which  maddened  my  envy  to  a  real  paroxysm. 
It  was  when  I  saw  him  unfasten  from  his  waistcoat 
a  chain  which  I  had  never  seen  before  and  take 
from  his  pocket  an  object  which,  also,  I  had  never 
before  seen,  and  this  was  —  at  the  end  of  the  chain,  and 
of  gold,  like  the  chain — a  watch,  with  his  monogram 
on  the  back.     He  handed  it  to  me,  and  said, — 

"See  the  present  that  my  guardian  has  given  me, 
for  my  prize ! " 

I  held  the  precious  object  in  my  hand.  That  you  may 
fully  understand  the  feelings  agitating  me  at  that  mo- 
ment, I  must  tell  you  that  the  only  watch  I  had  was  a 
very  ancient  silver  turnip.  To  have  a  watch  like  this 
one,  whose  yellow  metal  glittered  before  my  eyes, 
was  one  of  my  passionate  desires,  you  know,  one  of 
those  secret  fancies  in  which  the  imagination  of  an 
eleven-year-old  boy  envelops  infinite  felicities.  My 
uncle,  when  I  had  spoken  to  him  of  this  wish, 
had  said  to  me,  "You  shall  have  a  gold  watch  the 
day  you  graduate  from  the  lycee,  I  did  not  have  one 
till  after  the  Ecole  Normale.  It  is  a  great  luxury,  and 
you  must  deserve  it."    The  modest  professor  had  in  his 


312  children's  hearts 

moral  make-up  that  substratum  of  Jansenism,  so  com- 
mon at  that  time  among  our  middle-class  country  people. 
When  he  had  used  this  word  luxury,  I  knew  that  his 
decision  was  irrevocable.  And  this  treasure,  promised 
for  my  eighteenth  year,  as  the  reward  of  an  examina- 
tion which  appeared  to  me  a  very  formidable  affair, 
my  lucky  companion  possessed  at  this  present  moment ! 
I  could  not  thank  him  for  the  book  which  he  had 
kindly  brought  me ;  I  could  not  even  congratulate  him 
on  his  success.  I  returned  him  the  watch  with  such 
a  sad  face  that  this  amiable  boy  lost  sight,  for  the 
moment,  of  his  own  happiness.  He  did  not  take  time 
to  put  the  watch  into  his  pocket  again,  but  laying  it 
on  the  bedside  table  so  that  he  might  the  sooner  grasp 
my  hand,  he  exclaimed,  "You  are  in  pain?  What  is 
the  matter  ?  "  in  a  tone  that  ought  to  have  melted  my 
vile  and  shameful  rancour  into  affection.  Alas !  I  have 
often  since  observed,  in  others,  that  an  enemy's  gen- 
erosity almost  always  has  the  effect  of  increasing  the 
hatred  that  he  has  inspired.  I  could  see  it  in  my 
own  case,  in  this  crisis,  at  once  tragic  and  puerile. 
Octave's  evident  affection  for  me  was  insupportable, 
and,  sinking  back  upon  my  pillows,  I  said, — 

"  I  thought  I  was  better.  But  I  believe  I  am  not.  I 
am  very  tired  —  " 

"  Would  you  try  to  sleep  ?  "  my  uncle  asked,  and  as 
I  made  a  sign  in  the  affirmative,  the  worthy  man  and 
Octave  said    good-by  to  me.      They  went  away  with 


children's  hearts  313 

soft  footsteps,  after  closing  the  shutters  and  lowering 
the  curtains,  in  the  hope  that  darkness  would  help  me 
to  fall  asleep. 

I  was  now  alone,  in  this  artificial  night  broken  only 
by  one  ray  of  sunlight  appearing  where  these  curtains 
failed  to  meet,  and  I  was  ill,  ah !  how  ill  I  was !  The 
poisoned  bite  of  envy  tortured  my  soul,  and  all  the 
incidents  in  which  my  rival  had  unconsciously  humili- 
ated me,  returned  to  me  at  once.  I  saw  him  —  all  at  one 
single  glance  of  my  impotent  anger  —  seated  in  school 
at  the  honorary  desk  where  the  first  scholars  had  their 
seats,  never  again  to  leave  it ;  running  in  the  school  field 
always  more  rapidly  than  I ;  saluting  my  uncle  with  a 
grace  of  manner  that  contrasted  with  my  awkwardness ; 
spinning  his  top  with  a  skill  that  I  could  never  equal ; 
and,  finally,  drawing  from  his  pocket  this  gold  watch 
which  completed  the  exasperation  of  my  jealous  fury. 

And  now,  in  the  silence  of  the  darkened  room,  a 
sound,  at  first  almost  imperceptible  so  much  was  it 
confused  with  another  sound,  made  me  lift  my  head. 
I  listened.  It  came  from  the  marble  of  the  bedside 
table,  where  I  was  accustomed  to  place  my  old  silver 
turnip.  I  recognized  its  tic-tac,  rather  loud,  but  doubled 
as  it  were  by  another-  tic-tac,  more  musical,  clear,  and 
sharp.  It  was  as  if  two  insects  of  metal  were  running, 
unseen,  past  my  pillow,  each  with  its  own  step.  I 
lighted  a  match  and  looked :  Octave's  gold  watch  lay 
there  with   its   chain.      In   his   distress   at   seeing  me 


314  children's  hearts 

suffer  the  affectionate  boy,  though  so  orderly  in  general, 
had  left  it  there,  forgetting  it. 

Yes,  the  watch  was  there.  Instinctively  I  seized  it 
with  my  hand.  I  felt  it  palpitating  in  my  fingers  like 
a  living  creature ;  a  sudden  fury  possessed  me,  as  if  it 
really  were  alive  and  in  its  existence  were  embodied  all 
the  superiorities  of  him  to  whom  it  belonged.  Brutally, 
instinctively,  insanely,  with  a  strange  feeling  of  glutting 
my  hatred,  I  threw  the  watch  with  all  my  strength  upon 
the  marble  of  the  little  table,  and  listened.  From  the 
floor,  where  it  had  fallen,  the  same  tic-tac  came  up  to 
me,  sarcastic  now,  and  like  a  challenge.  The  shock 
had  not  broken  its  mainspring.  I  rose,  and  opened  the 
curtains  that  I  might  see.  I  picked  up  the  poor  watch, 
whose  crystal  had  been  broken  by  the  fall.  I  placed 
it  on  the  hearth,  and  taking  the  fire-shovel,  I  began 
beating  the  fragile  object  with  frenzied  blows.  I  saw, 
successively,  the  hands  broken  off,  the  enamel  of  the 
face  split,  the  case  dented  and  finally  crushed.  I  kept 
on  with  this  savage  vandalism  until  only  a  shapeless 
fragment  remained  at  the  end  of  the  chain.  Then, 
hastily,  feverishly,  like  a  malefactor  with  discovery 
close  on  his  heels,  I  rolled  the  fragments  and  the  chain 
together  in  a  piece  of  paper.  I  listened  again.  I  trem- 
bled lest  I  should  hear  the  footsteps  of  my  uncle  or  of 
the  maid.  But  there  was  nothing.  In  haste  I  put  on 
my  trousers  and  waistcoat.  My  window  opened  upon 
a  little  terrace,  at  whose  farther  end  was  the  mouth 


childken's  hearts  815 

of  an  immense  zinc  conduit  which  collected  the  rain- 
water, and  delivered  it  into  a  cistern  built,  after  the 
manner  usual  in  this  country  which  has  no  rivers,  under 
the  very  foundations  of  the  house.  I  slipped  out  as 
far  as  this  orifice,  and  dropped  into  it  the  little  pack- 
age which  might  have  denounced  me.  After  all  these 
days,  I  still  hear  the  splash  into  the  cistern  of  the 
broken  watch  and  its  chain.  I  returned  in  haste  to 
my  room.  I  still  had  presence  of  mind  to  pick  up  the 
fragments  of  glass  that  were  on  the  floor  near  the  bed. 
Those  I  merely  threw  out  upon  the  terrace.  I  then 
closed  the  windows,  the  inside  shutters,  the  curtains, 
and  I  slipped  into  bed.     I  was  saved. 


VI 

There  is  certainly  in  evil  a  kind  of  strength  which 
sustains  our  whole  inner  nature  and  breathes  into  us 
a  hitherto  unsuspected  energy.  Every  bad  act  makes  us 
capable  of  a  worse  one.  Almost  all  crimes  are  explained 
by  this  sinister  law  of  progression  in  wrong-doing,  in 
which  Christians  see  the  work  of  an  evil  spirit,  and  the 
mechanist-psychologists  of  the  present  day  are  pleased 
to  find  a  resemblance  to  the  acceleration  in  the  fall  of 
heavy  bodies.  For  my  part,  I  do  not  understand  its 
principle,  but  I  have  always  felt  it  in  the  course  of  my 
deviations  from  the  right  path  as  a  man  and,  for  the  first 
time,  in  a  striking  way,  in  this  moral  obliquity  as  a  child. 


316  children's  hearts 

I  was,  by  nature,  a  boy  who  spoke  the  truth.  My 
slightest  fibs  came  to  light  at  once  by  my  awkward- 
ness in  telling  them.  Well !  no  great  actor  could  have 
better  played  the  part  of  innocence  and  surprise  than 
I  did,  perhaps  twenty  minutes  after  envy  had  caused 
me  to  commit  the  act  of  barbarism  that  I  have  related 
to  you.  The  anxiety  as  to  my  illness  which  had  pre- 
vented Octave  from  remembering  to  put  the  watch  back 
into  its  fob,  had  also  prevented  him  from  noticing  its 
absence  when  he  was  taking  leave  of  my  uncle  and 
going  downstairs.  By  chance  he  met  at  the  door  M. 
Andr^,  the  Barbarian,  and  walked  a  few  steps  with 
him.  When  they  separated.  Octave  began  to  fear  that 
he  should  be  late  in  reaching  home,  and  it  occurred  to 
him  to  look  at  his  watch.  Then,  for  the  first  time,  he 
perceived  that  the  watch-pocket  was  empty.  This  dis- 
covery filled  him  with  terror.  He  retraced  his  steps, 
carefully  looking  on  the  pavement  as  he  did  so,  till  he 
reached  our  door,  when  suddenly  he  remembered  that 
he  had  given  me  the  watch  to  look  at.  He  ran  up 
our  staircase,  four  steps  at  a  time,  with  the  hope,  almost 
the  certainty,  of  immediately  recovering  his  treasure. 
Remorse  began  to  spring  up  in  me,  at  sight  of  his 
charming  face  full  of  anxiety  and  distress,  when,  my 
uncle  and  he  having  entered  my  room,  I  pretended  to 
awaken  from  sleep,  and  when,  the  window  being  opened, 
nothing  was  to  be  seen  on  my  bedside  table  but  the 
silver  turnip,  my  own.     I  spoke  to  you  just  now  of  the 


children's  hearts  317 

strength  of  evil.  Would  you  believe  that  I  was  hypo- 
critical enough  to  rise,  to  look  in  my  bed  and  under  it, 
to  shake  the  bedclothes  and  the  pillow,  and  finally  to 
say,  after  all  this  search, — 

"  It  seems  to  me  as  if  you  put  the  watch  back  into  your 
pocket.  In  that  case,  you  must  have  hooked  the  chain 
carelessly.     At  any  rate,  it  is  not  here." 

"  Yes,  that  is  it,"  Octave  replied ;  "  I  must  have  been 
careless  about  hooking  the  chain ;  "  then  with  a  tone  that 
very  nearly  wrung  from  me  the  confession  of  my  base 
act,  he  continued,  "and  what  shall  I  say  to  my  guar- 
dian who  took  so  much  pleasure  in  giving  me  the  watch 
this  morning  ?  No,  I  never  shall  dare  to  see  him  again ; 
I  had  had  the  watch  only  two  hours,  and  I  have  lost  it  I 
Mon  Dieu  !  mon  Dieu  !  " 

He  began  to  cry,  and  his  big  tears  seemed  to  fall  upon 
my  heart  and  burn  as  they  fell.  I  have  been  sufficiently 
explicit  as  to  my  bad  feelings  to  have  the  right  to  tell  you 
that  I  did  not  experience,  in  the  presence  of  this  grief, 
the  hateful  satisfaction  of  triumphant  envy  in  seeing  its 
victim  suffer.  In  glutting  my  anger,  I  had  exhausted  it, 
and  now  I  was  horrified  at  my  own  work.  Still,  shame 
was  again  stronger  than  penitence,  and  I  had  made  no 
confession  when  Octave  went  away,  accompanied  by  my 
uncle. 

"  We  must  go  to  the  police  at  once,"  my  good  uncle  had 
said,  "  and  report  the  loss.  Then  I  will  go  home  with  you 
to  M.  Montescot,  and  I  promise  you  you  shall  not  be 


318  children's  hearts 

scolded.  You  are  the  chief  sufferer  from  your  careless- 
ness. But  it  is  incredible.  The  street  is  paved.  If  your 
watch  fell  to  the  ground,  it  must  have  made  a  noise. 
Besides,  you  know  exactly  where  you  lost  it,  for  you  had 
it  when  you  were  at  our  house.  Somewhere  between  our 
house  and  M.  Andre's.  Unless  some  one  has  stolen  it  ? 
But  who  ?  " 

"  Some  one  stole  it  from  him,  no  doubt,"  said  Dr.  Pa- 
cotte  the  next  day,  when  the  incident  —  quite  an  event 
for  the  little  group  of  M.  Montescot's  friends  —  was  dis- 
cussed at  his  house.  It  was  the  usual  Sunday  session, 
but  the  philosopher  and  his  ward  were  absent.  They 
had  been  expecting  to  be  absent  for  a  week  at  Easter, 
visiting  friends  in  the  mountains.  They  had  carried  out 
their  plan,  notwithstanding  the  loss  of  the  watch,  com- 
mitting to  my  uncle  the  care  of  keeping  them  informed 
as  to  the  efforts  made  for  its  recovery.  This  absence  had 
been  a  great  relief  to  me.  I  could  not  have  endured  to 
meet  my  comrade  in  the  presence  of  the  doctor.  I  knew 
the  latter  to  be  so  clear-sighted  that  I  always  was  afraid 
of  his  glance,  even  when  innocent.  How,  then,  could  I 
bear  it  when  guilty  ?  While  he  repeated  these  words, 
"  Some  one  has  stolen  it,"  I  was  sure  that  those  pene- 
trating eyes  were  fixed  upon  me,  although,  apparently 
absorbed  in  a  book  of  engravings,  I  had  turned  away 
my  head.  "  To  rob  these  poor  people  was  doubly  abomi- 
nable. To  give  the  boy  a  gold  watch,  M.  Montescot  must 
have  deprived  himself  of  so  much !     And  we  know  how 


children's  hearts  319 

little  of  the  superfluous  there  is  in  his  life.  The  person 
who  has  stolen  this  watch  can  have  only  one  excuse,  — 
that  he  did  not  know  this.  If  he  knew  it  at  all,  he  would 
be  a  monster ! " 

No !  It  was  not  possible  that  the  old  doctor  could  be 
thinking  of  me  when  he  said  these  things.  Yet  why  did 
his  words  seek  out,  in  the  depths  of  my  consciousness,  the 
wounded  spot,  and  redouble  the  remorse  that  grew  and 
grew  in  my  soul  ?  Why  did  his  face  express,  when  I  met 
his  eyes,  a  severity  more  displeased  than  ever  ?  Was 
it  enough  for  that  observer  to  see  me  come  in,  that  Sun- 
day, to  divine  that  I  had  the  weight  of  a  secret  upon  my 
heart  ?  Had  he  watched  me,  by  stealth,  while  my  uncle 
related  the  loss  of  the  watch,  and  had  he  noticed  that, 
as  the  story  went  on,  I  turned  the  pages  .of  the  book 
more  and  more  nervously  ?  And  this  narration  of  the 
facts,  mentioning  that  Octave  had  taken  off  the  watch  to 
let  me  examine  it,  did  it  suggest  at  once  to  this  judicious 
thinker  the  true  explanation  ?  Certain  it  is  that  from 
the  mere  tone  of  the  old  man's  voice  I  felt  sure  that  he 
already  had  the  idea  that  I  was  the  culprit.  I  can  still 
hear  him  arguing  the  matter. 

"Besides,  this  rascal  is  not  only  a  monster,  he  is 
a  fool,  like  all  rascals.  Doubtless  he  does  not  know 
that  every  watch  has  its  number  on  the  case,  and  so, 
whenever  he  should  try  to  sell  it,  he  would  be  caught." 
My  uncle's  best  friend  believed  me  a  thief,  then ! 
Explain  who   can  the   strange  subterfuges    of    human 


320  children's  hearts 

pride,  always  similar,  even  in  a  boy  eleven  years  old ! 
Doubtless  it  was  a  very  criminal  act  to  have,  from 
envy,  destroyed,  as  I  had  done,  a  valuable  watch 
which  had  cost  the  ex-professor  all  his  poor  savings 
of  a  year.  But  I  had  not  been  so  vile  as  he  thought. 
I  had  not  stolen  the  watch  to  sell  it,  and  that  the 
doctor  believed  me  capable  of  an  act  so  infamous 
made  me  raise  my  head  indignantly  and  look  him 
in  the  face.  An  outcry  of  protest  was  upon  my  lips, 
but  did  not  escape  them.  All  the  usual  Sunday  guests 
were  present,  and  how  could  I  have  endured  to  speak 
before  them?  But  no,  I  must  have  been  mistaken, 
for  Dr.  Pacotte  had  already  changed  the  subject  of 
conversation,  and  neither  during  the  rest  of  the  after- 
noon nor  at  supper,  when  I  sat  near  him,  did  he 
make  allusion  again  to  the  disappearance  of  Octave's 
watch.  He  was,  on  the  contrary,  particularly  affection- 
ate toward  me,  as  if  he  had  really  calumniated  me  and 
owed  me  a  kind  of  reparation.  Explain  this,  also: 
his  severity  for  some  months  had  been  very  painful 
to  me;  the  unjust  suspicion  detected  in  his  words  had 
made  me  indignant;  and  now  his  petting  was  almost 
more  than  I  could  endure.  I  felt  too  strongly  that  I 
did  not  merit  it.  When  I  went  away,  I  was  literally 
smothered  with  shame. 

How  long  would  this  condition  have  lasted,  with 
alternative  desires  to  confess  and  to  keep  silent? 
Should  I  ever  have  come  to  the  point  of  revealing  to 


children's  hearts  321 

my  uncle  my  misconduct  ?  or  should  I  have  borne 
this  burden  upon  my  soul  indefinitely  —  until  I  should 
next  go  to  confession,  which  would  be  —  when?  My 
good  uncle  being  a  free-thinker,  I  fulfilled  only  the 
minimum  of  my  religious  duties.  Who  knows  ?  I 
might  even  have  lied  in  this  confession,  being  hardened 
by  my  silence,  and  perhaps  by  a  recrudescence  of  my 
envious  passion.  Fortunately  I  had  near  me,  in  those 
days  of  youthful  susceptibility,  in  the  person  of  the 
old  doctor,  one  of  those  great  connoisseurs  in  emotional 
suffering,  who  seek  to  do  good  to  those  around  them 
less  through  charity  than  from  an  intellectual  relish 
for  law,  and  from  a  love  of  health  in  themselves  and 
those  around  them.  This  fanatic  of  hygiene  had  for 
his  patients  somewhat  the  feeling  that  the  classic  poet 
attributes  to  the  goddess  of  wisdom:  "I  love  them 
as  the  gardener  loves  his  plants."  He  was  about  to 
treat  me  as  he  would  a  tree  in  his  garden,  and  use 
the  pruning-knife  just  where  it  was  needed,  that  the 
moral  nature,  an  instant  led  astray,  should  again 
become  normal  and  be  healed.  But  why  make  any 
commentary  upon  this  fine,  intelligent  benevolence? 
Eather  let  me  show  it  to  you  as  it  was. 

It  was  Wednesday  afternoon,  that  is  to  say,  more 
than  four  times  twenty-four  hours  had  passed  since 
I  had  committed  my  misdeed,  and,  as  I  had  been  doing 
incessantly  ever  since  that  moment,  I  was  thinking 
about  it,  with  that  insanity  of  conjecture  that  haunts 


322  children's  hearts 

a  criminal.  What  if,  in  sweeping  the  terrace,  any 
one  should  pick  up  some  bit  of  glass  which  had  escaped 
my  notice,  and  shoiild  recognize  it  as  part  of  a  watch- 
crystal  ?  What  if  it  became  necessary  to  clean  out  the 
cistern,  and  the  watch  itself  should  be  found?  If  — 
how  could  I  have  imagined,  among  so  many  possibili- 
ties, the  one  which  was  to  be  realized,  and  to  efface  all 
traces  of  my  detestable  villany  ?  It  rained  slightly, 
and  my  uncle  and  I  were  indoors,  —  he  at  work  before 
a  blackboard  on  some  problem  in  mathematics,  I  read- 
ing, or  trying  to  write.  The  door-bell  announced  a 
visitor.  The  maid  being  out,  my  uncle  bade  me  go 
to  the  door.  I  opened  the  door  with  beating  heart.  It 
was  one  of  my  terrors  that  the  doctor  might  go  to 
the  police  to  communicate  his  suspicions.  It  was 
the  doctor  himself,  but  alone,  and  with  a  smile  on  his 
lips,  kindly  but  mischievous.  He  took  off  his  clogs,  his 
mufl&er,  his  mittens,  carefully  and  slowly,  as  his  custom 
was.  He  wiped  his  spectacles,  clouded  by  the  rain, 
saying,  — 

"  Bad  weather  for  rheumatic  people !  Andre  phi 
sent  for  me  this  morning.  He  is  caught  by  the  \eg.  I 
said  to  him,  'You  have  no  disease,  you  have  a 
wine  cellar.  No  more  wine,  no  more  alcohol,  no  more 
pain ! '  But  it  was  just  so  with  poor  Darian,  the  head- 
master. A  colossus  !  He  could  have  killed  me  with 
one  blow  of  his  fist.  We  were  born  the  same  day.  I 
buried  him  in  1845.     Without  his  good  wine,  he  would 


children's  hearts  323 

not  have  had  the  gout ;  and  without  the  gout,  he  would 
be  alive  now," 

Then,  after  a  quiet  laugh,  and  when  my  uncle  had 
invited  him  to  take  a  seat  by  the  fire,  he  drew,  with 
his  long  fingers,  from  the  pocket  of  his  everlasting 
chestnut-colored  coat,  an  object  wrapped  in  paper  and 
began  to  undo  it,  saying,  "What  do  you  think  this 
is  ?  It  is  the  Hermes  Psychopompos  of  our  friend 
Montescot.  And  where  do  you  think  I  found  it  ? 
You  must  have  wondered  how  the  poor  man  obtained 
money  to  buy  that  gold  watch  which  was  stolen  from 
his  ward.  I  did,  too.  But  I  inquired  into  it.  I  went 
to  two  or  three  watchmakers —  Is  there  anything  the 
matter  with  you  ? "  he  asked  me,  suddenly  breaking 
off  his  remarks ;  and,  in  truth,  these  opening  words 
had  made  my  heart  literally  stand  still.  On  my  reply 
in  the  negative,  he  went  on,  "At  last  I  laid  my  hand 
on  old  Courault,  the  jeweller  in  the  rue  des  Notaires. 
He  did  not  wait  for  me  to  speak.  '  Ah !  monsieur  le 
docteur,'  he  said,  just  as  soon  as  he  saw  me,  'I  have 
something  for  you  —  an  antique  bronze ;  and  there !  it 
is  a  masterpiece.'  With  that,  he  pulls  out  of  his 
drawer  this ! "  And  the  old  collector  held  out  to  us 
the  bronze  statuette,  this  Hermes,  which  I  at  once 
recognized.  "I  compelled  old  Courault  to  confess," 
he  continued,  "and  at  last  I  found  out  how  Mon- 
tescot had  been  able  to  give  his  ward  an  object 
of  such  value.     You  know  what  store  he  sets  by  those 


324  children's  heabts 

things  in  his  glass  case,  —  his  Apollo,  his  Juno,  his 
Greek  vase,  this  Hermes  ?  You  know,  also,  how  he 
loves  Octave,  and  how  good  that  boy  is ;  how  his  con- 
duct has  been  ever  admirable  since  they  have  lived  here ! 
It  seems  as  if  he  understood  that  he  ought  to  make 
amends  to  his  protector  for  all  that  that  martyr  has 
suffered  for  the  sake  of  his  faith.  Montescot  wished 
to  reward  so  much  industry,  earnestness,  perfection. 
Probably  the  boy,  who  never  asks  for  anything,  in 
passing  by  Courault's  shop  may  have  said,  looking  at 
the  showcase  in  the  window,  'How  I  should  like  to 
have  one  of  those  watches ! '  And  this  worthy  Mon- 
tescot, instead  of  coming  to  me,  who  would  have  given 
a  suitable  price  for  this  Hermes,  simply  bartered  it 
for  the  watch,  to  give  Octave  a  present  which  would 
cause  him  real  pleasure.  Well,  it  was  that  destitute 
boy's  pleasure,  it  was  that  poor,  unfortunate  man's 
happiness,  that  the  thief  stole  with  the  watch.  —  But 
what  ails  you  ?  " 

"Yes,"  repeated  my  uncle,  turning  to  me;  "what 
ails  you  ?  " 

Convulsive  sobs  shook  me,  through  which  I  cried 
out,  "No,  doctor,  I  did  not  steal  it!  I  did  not 
steal  it!" 

"  You  did  not  steal  it  ? "  said  the  doctor,  with  a 
gesture  to  my  uncle  to  be  silent.  "Then  what  did 
you  do?     Come,  tell  us  the  whole  truth." 

"At  his  age!    A  thing  like  that!    Is  it  possible? 


children's  hearts  825 

Is  it  possible  ?  "  my  uncle  groaned,  while  I  confessed, 
througli  my  sobs,  all  my  madness  —  all  that  I  knew 
about  it,  at  least:  my  jealousy  of  Octave,  and  how 
I  had  been  unwilling  to  go  that  day  to  hear  the  prize 
announced,  my  emotion  when  I  saw  the  watch,  and  all 
that  followed. 

"Do  not  scold  him,"  the  doctor  said  gently,  when  I 
had  finished  this  recital  of  my  shame  and  my  remorse. 
"He  has  been  punished  enough.  And  besides,  he  has 
had  courage  to  confess.  It  was  very  well  done,  very 
well  done !  Besides,  all  is  made  good.  Yes,"  he  con- 
tinued, drawing  a  little  package  from  another  pocket, 
"  I  have  found  the  watch  myself,  and  to-morrow  it  shall 
be  sent  to  its  lawful  owner,  who  will  never  know  who 
took  it  from  him  or  who  returns  it."  And  he  showed 
us  a  watch,  in  every  respect  identical  with  the  other, 
which  he  had  bought  at  the  watchmaker's.  "Old 
Courault  will  keep  our  secret.  So  let  us  say  no  more 
about  it.  But  I  require  from  you  a  promise,"  he  con- 
tinued, laying  his  big  hand  on  my  head  and  speaking 
very  gravely.  "  You  are  to  take  this  little  bronze  and 
swear  to  me  that  you  will  keep  it  with  you  always. 
Keep  it  hidden  in  your  drawer,  that  Octave  may  not 
see  it;  but  whenever,  in  your  life,  you  are  tempted 
to  envy  the  good  fortune  or  the  success  of  another, 
look  at  this  Hermes,  and  I  have  no  fear  that  you 
will  ever  again  fall." 

And  indeed  I  have  kept  the  Hermes   with  me  al- 


326  children's  hearts 

ways.  In  my  hard,  artist-life  it  has  been  to  me  an 
infallible  talisman  against  the  most  hateful  of  all  hate- 
ful passions.  The  old  man  had  cured  me,  as  I  believe 
one  can  always  cure  a  child,  by  making  me  feel  all  the 
villany  of  my  act,  and  forgiving  me  for  it. 

April  1898 

II 

PRECOCIOUS    FEELINGS 

I  HAVE  found  the  following  pages  among  papers  left 
me  by  my  dead  friend,  Claude  Larcher.  These  leaf- 
lets were  doubtless  part  of  notes  to  be  used  in  the 
great  work  on  Love,  upon  which  Claude  was  occupied 
when  he  died,  for  he  had  them  arranged  with  many 
others  in  a  case,  inscribed:  "Precocious  Feelings."  I 
have  kept  this  title,  and  have  only  changed  the  names 
of  persons,  having  ascertained  on  inquiring  that  the 
story  was  strictly  true.  Had  he  lived,  Claude  him- 
self would  have  made  this  correction,  and  several 
others  doubtless.  I  have  not  felt  myself  at  liberty 
to  make  other  changes.  Pardon  the  faults,  therefore, 
of  these  pages  which  deal  with  the  inner  life. 


Among  my  recollections  of  childhood,  this  one  re- 
mains the  most  disturbing  of  all.  My  experience  of 
life  lights  it  up  now  with  a  pathetic  gleam,  and  the 


children's  hearts  327 

drama  of  the  affections  which  I  then  witnessed  without 
fully  comprehending  it,  wears  for  me,  across  the  years, 
a  poetry  of  mystery,  poignant  and  tragic.  My  imagi- 
nation was  awake,  however,  in  those  remote  days, 
for  it  allowed  me  to  feel  at  the  time  that  there 
was  a  mystery.  But  how  could  my  innocent  school- 
boy revery,  at  the  age  of  thirteen,  compass  the  verity 
of  certain  emotions  ?  I  am  surprised  myself  that  I 
divined,  notwithstanding  that  innocence,  what  I  did. 
And  then,  thinking  of  the  singular  child  that  I  was, 
I  say  to  myself  sometimes  that  nature  gives  to  those 
whom  she  destines  to  be  painters  of  the  passions 
something  like  a  premature  power  of  intuition,  an 
instinctive  comprehension  of  grief,  in  advance  of  their 
age  and  their  own  individual  thoughts. 

I  was  thirteen  years  old  at  the  time,  and  I  was  liv- 
ing with  my  grandfather,  who  had  been  a  lawyer, 
and  my  grandmother,  in  a  little  city  of  central  France. 
They  had  taken  charge  of  me,  an  orphan.  I  can  see 
it  still,  this  little  city,  as  if  I  were  still  the  boy  with 
close-cropped  hair  who,  four  times  a  day,  his  cartable 
on  his  back,  walked  with  his  grandfather  from  house 
to  school  and  from  school  to  house.  It  lay  on  a  little 
hillside,  the  last  spur  of  a  range  of  high  hills,  and  all 
its  streets  were  on  a  slope.  They  were  paved  with 
pointed  pebbles,  on  which  the  wooden  soles  of  my 
sabots  had  hard  work  not  to  slip,  in  the  wintry 
months.       These    streets    were    narrow    and    winding, 


328  children's  hearts 

a  useful  precaution  against  the  north  wind,  which 
came  straight  from  snow-covered  mountains  and  cut 
your  face  as  with  a  knife.  With  the  same  intention, 
the  tall  houses  of  black  stone  were  crowded  close, 
heaped  up  one  against  another.  Oh!  the  dismal, 
cold  city !  And  yet,  it  is  my  city,  the  only  place  in 
which  I  am  not  a  stranger,  a  mere  transient  visitor 
who  may  never  return.  My  city  is  part  of  myself, 
as  I  am  part  of  her.  There  is  not  a  bend  in  one  of 
those  gloomy  lanes  where  some  phantom  cannot  evoke 
man  or  woman  more  or  less  involved,  often  most 
imconsciously,  in  the  history  of  my  soul. 

I  think,  as  I  write  these  lines,  of  the  masculine  figure 
who,  at  the  period  of  my  thirteenth  year,  played  the  first 
rdle  in  my  imaginative  thoughts,  and  certainly  had  no 
idea  that  he  was  doing  this.  He  was  a  man  about  thirty 
years  of  age,  who  had  come  from  Paris  the  year  before 
to  fill  among  us  a  position  not  very  romantic,  it  would 
seem,  or  likely  to  fire  the  dreams  of  a  boy :  M.  de  Norry, 
for  that  was  his  name,  was  counsellor  set  the  prefecture. 
It  is  true  that,  at  this  time,  near  the  beginning  of  the 
Second  Empire,  the  administrative  body  was  admirably 
recruited.  The  government  saw  its  advantage  here,  and 
attracted  to  it  distinguished  young  men  of  the  best 
families.  I  can  now  see  that  my  ingenuous  admiration 
for  the  elegant  counsellor  was,  in  reality,  a  divination. 
I  have  said  that  he  came  from  Paris,  and  it  was  through 
him  that  I  received,  unconsciously,  my  first  impression 


children's  hearts  329 

of  Paris.  He  was  rather  tall,  slender,  with  fine  black 
eyes,  very  soft  and  velvety,  and  a  complexion  somewhat 
too  pale.  Was  it  this  pallor  which  struck  me,  on  his 
first  visit  to  my  grandfather's  house,  and  the  contrast 
between  this  fatigued  colouring  of  the  man  of  pleasure 
and  the  solid  ruddiness  of  the  provincial  faces  which 
surrounded  me?  Was  it  other  very  simple  peculiarities? 
But  there  is  nothing  simple  to  the  complicated  observa- 
tion of  some  children.  From  the  first  time  I  saw  him  I 
had  remarked,  for  example,  that  M.  de  Norry  wore  on 
the  little  finger  of  the  left  hand  a  ring  of  a  kind  I 
had  never  before  seen,  composed  of  two  little  snakes 
entwined,  with  two  sapphires  for  heads.  I  had  observed 
the  fineness  of  his  shoes  and  the  freshness  of  his  linen. 
I  still  inhale,  across  the  quarter  of  a  century,  the  faint, 
fresh  perfume  of  his  handkerchief,  and  I  hear  my  grand- 
father's voice  saying  to  my  grandmother,  with  a  sneer, 
when  the  counsellor  of  the  imperial  prefecture  had 
gone  out, — 

"  Those  brigands  have  sent  us  their  fleur  des  pois. 
But  this  fine  fellow  will  waste  his  time  here.  It  must 
be  one  of  R.'s  ideas.  Our  ladies  will  not  let  them- 
selves be  caught." 

I  was  quite  incapable  of  translating  into  its  true  bru- 
tality the  remark  of  the  old  Orleanist  lawyer,  and  I  still 
doubt  whether  the  Minister  of  the  Interior,  in  1859,  had 
the  naive  Machiavellic  design  of  sending  a  professional 
charmer  into  our  department  to  gain  over  the  feminine 


330  children's  hearts 

opinion  to  the  new  regime.  A  liberal  distribution  of 
licenses  to  sell  tobacco  and  of  red  ribbons  was  quite 
enough !  But  my  grandfather's  enigmatic  comment 
emphasized  too  strongly  the  exceptional  character  per- 
vading the  whole  personality  of  M.  de  Norry  for  me  not 
to  form  at  once  a  passionate  curiosity  as  to  this  new- 
comer in  our  city.  Even  the  unusual  term,  Jleur 
des  pois,  stimulated  this  curiosity.  What  connection 
could  there  be  between  the  flower  which  I  knew  so  well 
from  having  so  often  seen  it  whiten  the  green  rows 
in  our  vegetable  garden,  and  this  young  man,  with  his 
handsome  hands  and  his  fascinating  smile  ?  Who  were 
the  "  brigands,"  of  whom  my  grandfather  spoke  with 
so  evident  bitterness,  who  had  sent  M.  de  Norry  to  us  ? 
And  why  ?  How  was  R.  concerned  in  it  all,  a  former 
lawyer  here,  once  a  partisan  of  the  July  monarchy,  like 
my  uncle,  now  on  bad  terms  with  him,  and  a  minister  ? 
If  I  had  not  "  crystallized  "  around  these  first  sensations 
with  all  the  imaginative  strength  of  my  thirteen  years, 
it  is  probable  that  the  little  tragedy  to  which  I  am 
coming  would  have  passed  unnoticed  by  me;  and  if  I 
had  been  a  more  tranquil  boy,  less  apt  to  be  lured  by 
fancy  into  paths  dangerous  at  my  age,  it  is  very  probable 
also  as  a  man  that  my  life  would  have  been  happier 
and  less  battered.  But  it  was  written  that,  thus  early 
in  life  and  in  this  peaceful  nook  in  the  country,  the 
poetry  of  guilty  affections  should  be  revealed  to  me 
before  its  time.    We  shall  see  in  what  manner. 


children's  hearts  331 

II 

We  lived  in  the  old  city,  on  the  third  floor  of  an 
ancient  house,  built  I  could  not  say  when,  without 
much  architectural  character.  The  rooms  were  very 
lofty,  and  behind  the  house  lay  a  very  beautiful  large 
garden,  of  which  we  shared  the  use  with  the  proprietor, 
on  the  floor  below  us.  He  was  a  M.  Franqois  Eeal, 
one  of  the  three  or  four  great  landowners  of  the 
country,  concerning  whom  the  petty  proprietors  of 
our  acquaintance  were  wont  to  use,  with  respect,  the 
word  millionnaire,  and  he  himself  had  that  breadth 
of  shoulder,  that  manner  of  walking,  saluting,  laughing, 
talking,  which  marks  the  man  of  importance.  When 
I  remember  him  at  this  distance,  with  his  big  face 
and  its  broad  features  framed  in  short,  reddish  whiskers, 
with  the  shining  yellow  of  his  sly  and  joking  eye, 
with  the  insolent  pout  of  his  lip,  I  am  conscious  that 
in  him  I  beheld  a  finished  type  of  the  country  boor, 
who  has  but  three  strong  tastes,  —  for  the  chase,  for  the 
table,  and  for  his  money.  How  did  this  odious  brute 
happen  to  marry  a  creature  as  high-bred  as  he  was 
vulgar,  as  pretty  and  refined  as  he  was  coarse?  It  was 
the  everyday  incident  of  the  marriage  of  a  moneyed 
man,  the  son  and  grandson  of  usurers,  takers  of 
the  public  loans,  with  a  young  lady  noble  and  poor. 
Mme.  Keal  was,  on  the  father's  side,  a  Visignier  — 
one  of  those  Visigniers  whose  ruined  ch§,teau  remains 


332  children's  hearts 

a  place  of  interest  in  the  region.  From  this  union, 
which  this  coarse  Real  had  evidently  desired  through 
brutal  plebeian  pride,  was  born  one  daughter,  older 
than  I  by  four  years,  an  adorable  child,  exactly  like 
her  mother,  and  naturally  my  playmate  all  through  my 
early  childhood.  But  for  some  years  I  had  scarcely 
seen  her.  She  was  finishing  her  education  in  a  con- 
vent, reputed  aristocratic,  which  occasioned  from  my 
grandfather  —  who  had  in  a  degree  the  Voltairean 
prejudices  of  a  middle-class  admirer  of  Louis  Philippe, 
—  this  other  remark,  still  more  emphatic  to  me  than 
that  concerning  the  Jleur  des  pois :  — 

"If  this  upstart  of  a  Real  wanted  his  wife  to  turn 
out  badly,  he  could  not  do  anything  different.  He  was 
lucky  to  have  that  daughter.  It  was  the  mother's  salva- 
tion. And  he  sends  her  to  the  Sacre-Coeur,  through  van- 
ity !  You  will  see  what  will  happen.  Alone,  not  happy 
— there  will  be  confrerie.  It  is  inevitable !  And  that 
charming  creature !     What  a  pity  ! " 

How  many  times  these  inexplicable  words  recurred  to 
my  mind  while,  instead  of  being  at  my  lessons,  I  watched, 
hidden  behind  a  curtain,  through  the  window-panes,  the 
pretty  Mme.  Real,  Marguerite  by  name,  walking,  a  book 
in  hand,  along  the  sanded  alleys.  I  saw  her  figure,  so 
young  and  so  graceful,  with  her  thirty-five  years.  Her 
delicate  profile  was  relieved  against  the  background  of 
verdure  and  flowers,  if  it  was  summer ;  and  if  it  was  au- 
tumn, against  the  russet  masses  of  Avithered  foliage. 


children's  hearts  333 

The  silky  gold  of  her  hair  shone  under  her  garden  hat. 
Her  hands,  very  white  through  the  lace  of  her  black  mit- 
tens, opened  or  closed  her  book.  Her  little  feet  escaped 
from  under  the  edge  of  her  dress,  with  the  rhythm  of  her 
walk,  and  she  lifted  her  eyes  from  her  book  to  let  them 
wander  over  the  horizon  of  mountains  which  notched  the 
sky  above  the  walls  of  the  garden,  clothed  with  ivy 
through  which  the  wind  sent  a  shiver.  I  repeated  to  my- 
self my  grandfather's  observation  without  understanding 
it  at  all,  except  that  some  danger  threatened  this  sweet, 
ideal  creature,  and  the  inexplicable  words,  some  comic 
and  low,  others  pathetic,  made  me  dream  indefinitely. 
"  Turn  out  badly  ?  "  I  had  heard  it  said  of  one  of  my 
cousins  that  he  had  turned  out  badly.  He  had  enlisted 
in  the  cavalry  as  a  common  trooper !  —  "  confrerie  9  "  I 
knew  of  one  confrSrie,  that  of  the  Scapulary,  to  which  my 
grandmother  belonged,  who  was  as  pious  as  my  grand- 
father was  the  reverse.  "  What  a  pity ! "  This  touched 
a  pity  in  me  which  extended  by  a  feeling  which  I  could 
not  understand  from  the  mother  to  my  little  friend,  the 
pretty  Isabelle,  with  whom  I  had  so  often  raced  over  the 
sand  of  these  same  alleys,  before  paternal  vanity,  blamed 
by  the  old  free-thinking  lawyer,  had  imprisoned  her  in  a 
convent ;  and  when  I  sat  down  to  my  studies  again,  dis- 
tress at  the  mysterious  danger  suspended  over  these  two 
beings  seized  me  sometimes  so  strongly  that  I  could 
have  wept. 


334  children's  hearts 


UI 

What  was  the  precise  moment  when  my  childish 
mind  began  to  associate  the  image  of  the  man  who  had 
produced  so  strong  an  impression  upon  me,  at  the  time 
of  his  first  visit,  with  that  of  the  unhappily  married 
mother  of  my  absent  playmate  ?  This  I  cannot  tell ; 
it  was  only  natural  that  M.  de  Norry,  as  an  official  at 
the  prefecture,  should  have  become  acquainted  with 
the  principal  citizens;  and  his  presence,  more  or  less 
frequent,  in  a  house  where  two  of  them  lived,  —  my 
grandfather  Maitre  Gaspard  Larcher  and  M.  Frangois 
Real,  —  would  not,  certainly,  have  excited  my  notice, 
if  again  this  worthy  grandfather,  who  decidedly  did 
not  sufficiently  take  into  account  my  mental  precocity, 
had  not  made  another  imprudent  remark  in  my  hearing. 
We  were  returning  from  a  walk,  about  four  o'clock  in 
the  afternoon.  There  had  been  no  school  that  day, 
therefore  it  must  have  been  either  a  Sunday  or  a  Thurs- 
day, in  the  autumn  of  1859.  Before  the  door  of  our 
house  a  carriage  was  standing.  It  was  a  two-wheeled 
"  buggy,"  the  only  one  in  the  place,  and  it  belonged  to 
the  man  whom  I  so  much  admired.  There  was  har- 
nessed to  it  a  very  stout  pony  of  a  build  also  unique  in 
our  land  of  mountain  nags  that  were  shaped  like  goats. 
The  counsellor's  animal  had  enormous  withers,  a  broad 
chest,  and  the  back  and  crupper  of  a  cob.  He  was  very 
shaggy,  with  short  black  legs  under  his  dappled-gray 


children's  hearts  335 

body.  His  mane  was  cropped  close,  and  in  his  polished 
leather  harness,  with  a  count's  coronet  in  the  proper 
places,  the  pony  was  as  much  of  a  marvel  to  me  as  his 
master  was.  Or  rather  my  two  raptures  of  admiration 
were  blended  into  one,  when  the  young  man  passed  in 
this  light  carriage,  at  the  long  trot  of  this  agile  pony. 
I  gazed  at  him  as  I  should  have  gazed  at  the  Phaeton 
of  Ovid's  Metamorphoses  (which  I  was  translating  at 
the  time),  had  that  personage  driven  the  chariot  of 
the  Sun  over  the  pointed  pavement  of  our  city  streets. 
No  sooner  had  I  espied  this  equipage  in  the  distance 
than  I  exclaimed,  "Why,  that  is  M.  de  Norry's  car- 
riage ! " 

"Where  is  it?"  asked  my  grandfather,  whose  sight 
was  somewhat  enfeebled. 

"Why,  in  front  of  our  house!" 

"  Oh ! "  said  my  grandfather ;  "  then  he  has  come  to 
see  her  again  to-day !  " 

He  added  not  a  word  to  this  exclamation,  which  he 
had  flung  out  as  if  speaking  to  himself,  in  a  tone  so 
peculiar  that  I  was  quite  struck  by  it.  I  had  no  need 
to  ask  him  who  the  person  was,  whom  the  possessor  of 
this  wonderful  horse  had  come  to  see  "again  to-day." 
I  had  met  M.  de  Norry  the  preceding  day,  at  the  same 
hour,  as  I  was  returning  from  school,  but  this  time 
he  was  on  foot,  and  on  his  way  to  our  house.  I  had 
seen  him  enter;  and  it  must  have  been  Mme.  Real  — 
since  it  was  not  my  grandmother  —  to  whom  he  paid  his 


336  childeen's  hearts 

visit.  Why  did  these  two  visits,  so  near  together,  cause 
my  grandfather  so  much  concern  ?  His  voice  had 
changed,  his  face  had  suddenly  clouded  over,  and  his 
gesture  was  almost  rough,  to  prevent  me  from  stopping 
fascinated  before  the  pony,  who  must  have  been  stand- 
ing there  a  long  time  already,  for  he  had,  with  his 
impatient  hoof,  dug  a  large  hole  in  the  ground,  and 
the  groom,  standing  by  him,  himself  was  kicking  at 
the  ground,  like  a  man  chilled  by  long  waiting. 
This  picture,  in  the  melancholy  light  of  a  November 
afternoon,  is  present  to  my  gaze  at  this  moment,  from 
the  little  rosettes  at  the  horse's  ears  which  vibrated  at 
every  snort  from  his  big  head,  to  the  tall  figure  of  my 
grandfather,  disappearing  under  the  tall  porte-cochere 
and  dragging  me  with  him ;  and  I  find  no  less  present 
to  my  memory  my  feeling  that  between  Mme.  Real  and 
M.  de  Norry  something  was  going  on,  or  was  to  go  on, 
which  prodigiously  displeased  him. 


IV 

Something  ?  But  what  ?  In  seeking  to  reconstruct, 
with  my  mature  intelligence,  the  shadowy  images  of  my 
childish  consciousness,  I  find  it  hard  to  reconcile  two 
facts,  absolutely  certain  and  contradictory :  on  the  one 
hand,  my  entire  ignorance  of  the  realities  of  life ;  and, 
on  the  other,  the  real  trouble  caused  me  by  this  suspi- 
cious remark  of  my  grandfather,  which  must  have  had  a 


children's  hearts  337 

kind  of  meaning  for  me.  My  grandfather  had  not  said 
that  M.  de  Norry  was  attentive  to  Mme.  Eeal,  or  that  he 
was  in  love  with  her.  Still,  that  is  what  I  had  under- 
stood. How  had  I  understood  it  ?  With  what  pres- 
tige, for  my  imagination,  was  already  invested  this  sen- 
timent of  love,  which  represented  to  me  only  the  most 
visionary  and  undefined  of  enthusiasms  ?  Of  this  I  have 
no  idea.  But  what  I  am  quite  sure  of  is  that  never  had 
I  experienced  anything  like  this  disturbance  awakened 
in  me,  this  fever  of  devouring  curiosity  with  which  I  was 
suddenly  attacked,  this  anxiety  to  know  what  M.  de 
Norry  and  Mme.  Eeal  felt  for  each  other  —  a  trouble, 
fever,  and  anxiety  whose  most  manifest  result  was  (I 
being  but  a  child)  to  make  me  obtain  at  school  a 
quantity  of  bad  marks ;  for,  instead  of  working  indus- 
triously, as  heretofore,  at  my  tasks,  my  principal  occu- 
pation consisted,  for  many  weeks,  in  practising  the  most 
infantine,  and  also  the  most  ineffectual,  espionage. 
Sometimes  it  was  a  pretext  that  I  devised,  in  the  midst 
of  translating  a  page  of  Latin,  for  going  below ;  and  I 
would  rush  down  the  great  stone  staircase,  four  steps  at 
a  time,  to  see  if  the  buggy,  with  the  gray  black-legged 
pony,  was  standing  before  our  door ;  sometimes  I  glued 
my  forehead  indefatigably  to  the  window  glass  to 
follow  with  my  eyes  Mme.  Edal  as  she  paced  the  garden 
alleys ;  and  her  walks  were  more  and  more  frequent  and 
of  longer  duration,  although  the  lateness  of  the  season 
must  have  rendered  them  less  and  less  agreeable.     The 


338  children's  hearts 

young  woman  no  longer  carried  a  book.  Her  delicate 
shoulders  draped  in  a  cacliemire  shawl,  she  walked  bare- 
headed with  folded  arms,  treading  underfoot  the  dead 
leaves  that  the  wind  sometimes  blew  around  her,  and  it 
would  happen,  in  sunny  hours,  that  one  of  these  yellow 
leaves,  falling  from  a  tree,  whirled  and  whirled  in  the 
sunlight  and  rested  at  last  upon  her  hair,  more  golden 
yellow  than  the  leaf.  This  she  never  even  noticed, 
plunged  in  thoughts  that  I  was  hungry  to  know.  To- 
day how  clear  to  me  is  the  enigma  of  those  prolonged 
walks !  This  woman  of  the  country,  to  whom  the  brill- 
iant Parisian  was  paying  court,  had  come  to  the  period 
of  inner  struggles,  secret  revolts,  wishes  by  turns  cher- 
ished and  repressed.  My  poor  little  thirteen  years  had 
not  yet  known  that  grievous  invasion  of  the  heart  by  a 
criminal  desire.  How  did  I  divine  the  silent  tragedy  of 
which  the  romantic  dreamer  in  that  autumnal  garden 
was  the  victim?  And  I  did  divine  it.  Yes.  I  di- 
vined that,  alone  in  reality  in  her  walk,  in  thought 
she  was  not  alone.  I  divined  whose  image  accom- 
panied her  in  those  long  hours  of  meditation,  summoned 
and  repulsed  by  turns,  and  the  proof  of  it  is  in  my 
absence  of  surprise  when,  one  afternoon,  having  placed 
myself  as  usual  at  my  post  of  observation,  I  saw  that 
this  time,  in  her  visit  to  the  quiet  garden,  M.  de  Norry 
himself  was  with  her. 

How  distinctly  present  is  that  scene  to  me  now!    It 
must  be  that  this  mystery  bit  deep  into  my  imagination 


children's  hearts  339 

to  have  made  every  detail  of  so  simple  an  episode  per- 
manent in  my  memory.  Again  I  see  my  native  sky, 
veiled,  padded,  with  a  soft  mist;  and  the  box  edging 
of  the  alleys;  and  the  oaks,  with  their  rusty  foliage; 
and  the  plane  trees,  with  their  big,  copper-coloured 
leaves;  and  the  two  walking  under  the  trees;  and  the 
pane  of  glass  clouded  at  moments  by  my  breath;  and 
once  more  I  feel  the  shock  of  terror,  as  of  a  thief 
caught  in  the  act.  My  grandfather's  hand  is  upon  my 
shoulder,  and  I  hear  his  voice,  which  says  to  me, — 

"  What  are  you  doing  there  ?  Since  you  won't  work, 
go  play  in  the  garden.  Go  play !  "  he  repeated.  Why, 
in  giving  me  this  order,  —  so  contrary  to  all  discipline, 
—  had  he  this  imperative  manner?  Why,  suddenly 
enfranchised  from  my  tasks,  instead  of  running  down- 
stairs with  the  delight  which  would  have  been  natural, 
did  I  tremble  from  head  to  foot?  Why  had  I  this 
terrified  timidity  at  the  idea  of  mingling  my  childish 
sports  with  this  walk  of  M.  de  Norry  and  Mme.  Eeal  ? 
And  now  I  was  in  the  garden,  sure  that  behind  the 
glass  where  I  just  now  had  been  concealed  my  formi- 
dable relative  was  standing  watching  me.  For  the 
sake  of  doing  something,  I  began  to  run  down  one 
alley  and  then,  aimlessly,  down  another.  And  so  I 
came  to  the  end  of  the  garden,  to  a  kind  of  pavilion  — 
a  rustic  arbour,  rather  —  where  we  used  sometimes  to 
sit  in  summer,  and  I  saw  before  the  entrance  the  two, 
in  pursuit  of  whom  my  grandfather  so  evidently  had  sent 


340  children's  hearts 

me.  Their  attitude  betrayed  too  well  —  even  to  eyes 
innocent  as  mine  —  the  conflict  between  them  at  the 
moment:  he,  holding  the  young  woman's  hand  and 
drawing  her  toward  the  arbour;  she,  endeavouring  to 
withdraw  her  hand  and  refusing  to  follow  him.  They 
perceived  me.  M.  de  Norry  grew  very  pale  and  dropped 
Mme.  Eeal's  hand.  I  shall  see,  while  I  live,  the  young 
woman's  agitated  smile,  her  beautiful  eyes,  into  which 
came  a  gleam  of  terror  and  of  relief;  and  I  shall  hear 
her  voice,  smothered  and  imploring,  as  she  called  me 
to  her :  "  Claude !  Claude !  I  am  so  glad  you  came ! 
Don't  go  away !  Come,  walk  with  us ;  we  are  going 
to  get  some  holly."  And  she  repeated,  "My  little 
Claude !    I  am  so  glad  you  came !  " 


At  this  point  my  recollections  lose  distinctness,  prob- 
ably because  Mme.  Keal  and  M.  de  Norry  both  consid- 
ered me,  though  for  different  reasons,  as  a  dangerous 
witness.  Perhaps  this  scene  merely  made  them  more 
prudent.  Possibly,  too,  thoughts  better  suited  to  my 
age  may  have  absorbed  my  attention.  Christmas  and 
New  Year's  Day  were  approaching,  and  curiosity  as  to 
my  future  presents  probably  got  the  better  of  all  other 
feelings.  What  I  remember  very  clearly  —  in  addition 
to  the  other  scenes  which  I  have  to  describe  —  is  that 
my  grandfather  questioned  me  closely,  when  I  came  in 


children's  hearts  841 

from  my  walk  with  M.  de  Norry  and  Mme.  Real,  as  to 
the  way  I  had  spent  my  time  in  the  garden.  I  related 
to  him,  no  less  minutely,  our  gathering  the  holly  from 
the  garden  wall,  and  made  no  mention  at  all  of  the 
arbour.  An  invincible  bashfulness  —  I  can  find  no 
other  word  —  kept  me  silent.  I  remember,  also,  that 
my  aforesaid  grandfather  was  absent  from  home,  about 
this  time,  for  four  or  five  days.  He  made  a  journey 
to  Paris,  whose  motive  is  now  rendered  plain  to  me  by 
the  name  of  the  minister  of  whom  I  have  already  spoken. 
M.   Larcher  had    too  often  stigmatized   the  treachery 

of  the  infamous  R ,  who  had  gone  over  to  Bona- 

partism,  for  me  not  to  be  much  astonished  on  hearing 
him,  on  his  return,  say  to  his  wife,  after  mentioning 
this  man's  name, 

"  Well !  I  saw  him ;  and  it  will  be  done  the  next 
time  any  charges  are  made.  We  wept,  like  two  old 
donkeys,  when  we  met.  After  all,  he  is  an  old 
friend.  And  then  it  was  the  only  way !  But  is  there 
still  time?     You  know,  I  could  not  bear  it  — " 

The  worthy  man  had  gone  to  beg  his  old  friend  to 
send  another  counsellor  to  the  prefecture.  That  step 
no  romantic  interest  helped  me  to  divine.  I  could  per- 
ceive, indeed,  by  the  tone  of  the  two  old  people  that 
there  must  be  something  about  M.  de  Norry  on  foot; 
but  I  perceived  it  so  vaguely  that  I  have  no  recollection 
of  any  thoughts  which  this  journey  to  Paris  must  have 
suggested  to  me;   on  the  other  hand,  all  the  darkness 


342  children's  hearts 

of  the  past  is  scattered,  and  I  am  conscious,  almost 
painfully,  so  intense  is  this  consciousness,  of  the  feel- 
ings that  I  had  toward  this  same  M,  de  Norry  about 
two  weeks  after  my  grandfather's  return. 

It  was  the  evening  of  the  6th  of  January.  I  am 
able  to  fix  the  date  with  certainty  because  we  were 
all  at  a  Twelfth-Night  dinner  at  Mme.  Eeal's.  The 
country  dining  room  was  all  filled  with  the  tumult 
of  a  long  repast  just  ending.  The  immense  table  was 
lighted  by  an  old  carcel-lamp  hanging  from  a  chan- 
delier with  twenty  candles  surrounding  it.  I  still 
see  the  square  hole  through  which  the  key  was  intro- 
duced to  wind  up  the  lamp.  M.  Francois  Real  pre- 
sided, high-coloured,  excited  by  wine,  having  at  his 
right  my  grandmother,  very  dignified,  with  her  long 
white  curls.  My  grandfather  was  at  Mme.  Real's 
right,  and  at  her  left,  M.  de  Norry.  The  young 
woman's  face,  showing  traces  of  the  struggle  she  had 
maintained  with  herself  so  many  months,  was  sad  to 
see  that  evening.  Her  large  blue  eyes  shone  with 
a  kind  of  feverish  brilliancy,  and  the  pallor  of  her 
face  was  like  the  tint  of  porcelain.  A  kind  of  sad- 
ness emanated  from  her  whole  person,  contrasting 
most  remarkably  with  the  singular  joy  in  the  eyes 
and  in  the  face  of  the  man  who  sat  beside  her.  The 
counsellor  of  the  prefecture  never  appeared  to  me 
before  so  radiant  in  manly  beauty  and  distinction. 
A  certainty  of  triumph  seemed  to  pervade  his  whole 


children's  hearts  343 

being;  and  his  slightest  movements,  his  gestures, 
his  looks,  his  smiles,  were  stamped  with  that  vic- 
torious grace  which  man  has,  as  well  as  woman,  at 
some  moments.  I  was  not  the  only  person  who  ob- 
served this.  My  grandfather's  manifest  discomfort 
attested  that  he  found  the  removal  promised  by  his 
friend  the  renegade  far  too  slow  in  taking  effect; 
and  more  than  his  uneasiness,  more  than  Mme.  Real's 
excitement,  what  struck  me  during  dinner,  what  cut  me 
to  the  heart,  so  that  for  the  first  time  I  felt  a  hatred 
for  this  beauty  of  M.  de  Norry,  this  elegance,  this 
superiority,  all  that  separated  him  from  the  country 
group  gathered  there,  —  was  the  fact  that  another  person 
was  hypnotized  by  him,  and  that  this  person  was  my 
own  neighbour  at  table,  the  charming  Isabelle  Real, 
at  home  from  her  convent  for  the  holidays.  I  had 
found  her  prettier  than  ever,  more  like  her  mother  in 
the  aristocratic  elegance  of  her  face  and  manners;  but 
grown  so  tall,  so  changed,  so  lost  to  me !  The  four 
years  between  our  ages  might  have  been  six  —  might 
have  been  ten.  I  was  still  a  little  boy.  She  was 
already  a  young  lady.  Her  fair  hair  no  longer  fell 
in  waves  over  her  shoulders  as  before.  It  was  gath- 
ered up  in  a  close  knot.  Her  long  dress  made  her 
seem  taller.  Her  movements,  formerly  a  little  brusque 
and  boyish,  were  now  more  gentle,  more  refined.  In 
speaking  to  me  when  we  first  met,  she  had  treated  me 
with  a  familiarity  at  once  affectionate  and  distant,  all 


344  children's  hearts 

the  more  painful  to  me  because  I  was  conscious  of 
being  strangely  intimidated  in  her  presence;  and  now, 
at  the  dinner  table,  this  feeling  that  an  abyss  had 
suddenly  opened  between  us  did  but  make  itself  more 
distinct ;  and  at  the  same  time  another  grief  sprang 
up  within  me,  a  jealousy  sudden,  animal,  irresistible, 
in  respect  to  the  young  man  at  Mme.  Real's  side, 
toward  whom  went  all  the  glances,  interests,  impres- 
sions, and  thoughts  of  my  neighbour.  Innocent  as  she 
was,  and  transparent  of  heart  as  of  look,  Isabelle  never 
dreamed  of  concealing  her  frank  admiration  for  the 
young  man. 

"  M.  de  Norry  is  very  handsome,  don't  you  think  so  ?  " 
she  had  said  to  me,  as  we  sat  down  at  table,  and  I  had 
replied  to  her,  by  an  instinct  of  contradiction  that 
proves  how  completely  the  man  already  exists  in  the 
boy,— 

"  Why,  no !  I  don't  think  so ;  he  is  too  pale,  for  one 
thing." 

"  Oh ! "  she  had  rejoined,  "  that  is  so  distinguished 
looking ! " 

At  the  moment  while  she  was  making  this  very  child- 
ish remark  to  me,  I  had  caught  a  glimpse  of  myself,  in 
one  of  the  mirrors  which  adorned  the  wall,  with  my 
ruddy,  sunburnt  face  of  a  boy  always  in  the  open  air. 
I  had  made  no  reply,  but  my  suffering  had  begun,  and 
immediately  a  thought  had  seized  upon  me. 

"They  will    have  a  Twelfth-Kight    cake.      I    hope 


children's  hearts  345 

Isabelle  will  not  get  the  bean.  I  am  sure  she  wonld 
choose   /w'm." 

No  sooner  had  the  idea  entered  my  mind  than  it  became 
an  established  certainty.  I  felt  a  choking  sensation ;  an 
insupportable  anguish  of  expectation  weighed  upon  my 
heart,  growing  every  moment  heavier,  through  the  endless 
courses  of  a  rich  country  feast,  until  the  moment  when 
the  enormous  iced  cake  was  set  before  Mme.  Eeal,  already 
cut  into  as  many  pieces  as  there  were  guests  at  table. 
The  servants  go  about,  bringing  a  piece  to  each  person. 
The  knives  and  forks  gayly  reduce  to  tiny  bits  the  pas- 
try, which  exhales  its  pleasant  odour  of  fresh  butter  and 
spices.  A  little  cry  of  joy  comes  from  my  neighbour ;  my 
presentiment  was  fulfilled  —  Isabelle  had  the  bean  ! 

"  Oh !  I  am  the  Queen ! "  she  said,  and  for  an  instant 
the  child  that  she  was  but  yesterday  reappeared  under 
the  young  lady  of  to-day.  She  clapped  her  hands,  repeat- 
ing, "  I  am  the  Queen  ! "  And  immediately  a  voice 
replied  to  her  which  made  her  blush  and  grow  sober  — 
her  father's  voice  it  was,  calling  out,  "You  are  the 
Queen.     You  must  choose  yourself  a  King." 

She  looked  around  the  table,  as  if  hesitating,  and  every 
man's  face  was  turned  toward  her  —  some  mischievously, 
some  inquisitively.  M.  de  Norry  also  looked  at  her,  with 
that  condescending  look  he  would  naturally  give  to  a 
little  girl.  She  was  to  him  what  I  was  to  her  —  a  creature 
of  no  account.  And  I  with  the  rest  perceived  this 
amused  indifference,  which  exasperated  me  still  more. 


346  children's  hearts 

Isabelle  seemed  still  to  hesitate.  For  an  instant  her  blue 
eyes  rested  upon  me.  I  had  a  momentary  hope  that  she 
was  going  to  choose  me.  The  clear  eyes  turned  toward 
him  whom  I  had  foreseen  as  her  choice,  and,  blushing 
yet  more,  she  stammered,  rather  than  said,  — 

"  I  choose  M.  de  Norry  for  my  King." 

"  Then,"  her  father  again  called  out  to  her,  "  fill  your 
glass  with  champagne,  and  go  and  drink  with  your 
King ! " 

Isabelle  took  the  slender  glass,  into  which  the  servant 
had  poured  the  sparkling  wine  crowned  with  its  light 
foam,  and  she  went  around  the  table  to  the  place  where 
M.  de  Korry  was  sitting.  Then,  as  she  held  out  her 
glass,  with  a  timid  smile,  to  touch  his,  the  young 
man,  on  his  part,  with  a  little  petting  gesture  which 
proved  how  entirely  he  regarded  her  as  a  child,  took 
her  hand  and,  drawing  her  toward  him,  touched  her 
forehead  with  his  lips.  Scarcely  had  I  time  to  feel 
the  sting  of  jealousy  at  this  innocent  kiss,  for  sud- 
denly I  heard  my  grandfather's  voice  saying, — 

"  Why,  Madame  Real,  what  is  it  ?  What  is  the  mat- 
ter ?     She  is  ill !     Quick,  give  her  air !  " 

"It  was  nothing,"  replied  Isabelle's  mother.  "It  is 
the  heat  of  the  room,  I  think.  Gentlemen,  I  beg  your 
pardon."  She  made  an  effort  to  smile  and  to  rise 
from  her  seat,  then  fell  back,  fainting. 


children's  hearts  347 

VI 

"Well,"  said  my  grandfather  to  his  wife,  holding 
out  to  her  the  newspaper,  a  week  after  the  Twelfth- 
Night   dinner  that   had  been  so  strangely  interrupted, 

"R has  kept  his  word.     Our  bird  takes  flight.     He 

is  sent  to  Marseilles.     It  is  a  step  in  advance." 

"  Does  Madame  Real  know  it  ? "  my  grandmother 
asked. 

"I  suppose  Real  has  told  her,"  rejoined  my  grand- 
father. "  She  has  not  left  her  bed  since  her  fainting 
fit.  There  is  a  fellow,  that  Real,  who  owes  me  a  big 
candle,"  he  added,  after  a  minute's  silence,  "but  he 
will  never  know  it !  And,  besides,  I  did  not  do  it  for 
him.     However,  she  is  saved." 

M.  de  Norry  did,  in  fact,  leave  the  city  to  go  to  his  new 
post  without  having  again  seen  Mme.  Real  —  who  was 
long  in  recovering  from  what  the  doctors  called  a  ner- 
vous fever.  And  saved  she  was  —  though  whether  by 
the  fever  or  by  my  grandfather,  who  can  tell  ?  The 
worthy  lawyer  died  in  the  belief  that  this  salvage  was 
due  to  him.  Now  that  the  boy  who  listened,  crouching 
in  the  corner,  to  the  words  of  the  two  old  people,  with- 
out their  noticing  his  presence,  has  become  a  man,  he 
does  not  fully  accept  his  grandfather's  view,  nor  does 
he  have  any  more  faith  in  the  reality  of  the  fever. 
He  remembers  the  mother  looking  at  her  tall  daughter, 
agitated,  almost  in  love,  stooping  to  the  kiss  of  the 


348  children's  hearts 

man  she  herself  was  about  to  accept  as  her  lover. 
And  he  believes  that  it  was  that  sight  that  hindered 
Mme.  Rdal   from  going  further  in  the  path  of  danger. 

Januabt  1900 

III 

BESUBRECTION 


Slowly,  sadly,  Elizabeth  de  Fresne  had  climbed  the 
slope  of  the  hill,  wooded  and  walled  in,  which  made 
a  park  for  her  villa.  She  had  seated  herself  on  the 
rock,  upon  the  terrace  which  had  been  laid  out  there 
in  happier  days,  and  from  which  her  eyes  could  see 
one  of  the  most  extensive  views  of  sea  and  mountains 
in  all  Provence  —  so  beautiful  that  it  has  given  to  this 
part  of  the  neighbourhood  of  Hyferes  the  name  of  Cos- 
tebelle.  At  her  feet  the  irregular  crests  of  the  Aleppo 
pines  were  green  and  waving  in  little  shivers  in  the 
breeze  from  the  bay,  which  was  blue  in  the  distance, 
enclosed  on  one  side  by  the  two  long,  narrow  roads 
of  the  peninsula  of  Giens,  and  on  the  other  by  the 
fortified  point  of  Breganqon.  The  island  of  Porque- 
rolles  and  its  notched  rocks,  that  of  Port  Cros  and  its 
lookout,  that  of  the  Levant  and  its  barren  moors,  barred 
the  horizon  in  the  distance.  At  the  young  woman's 
left  stretched  the  sombre  chain  of  the  Maures,  beneath 
which  lay  in  rows,  one  below  another,  on  the  hill  slope, 


children's  hearts  349 

the  white  houses  of  Hyeres.  And  the  radiant  sun 
enwrapped  with  its  splendour  this  forest,  these  waves, 
these  islands,  these  hills,  these  remote  fagades  —  a 
divine  late  March  sun  which,  nearer,  caressed  the 
pink  villa  and  the  alleys  of  the  garden  adjacent  to  the 
park,  with  their  mimosas  in  bloom,  their  beds  of  pur- 
ple iris,  of  red  and  white  carnations,  their  clumps  of 
pale  roses  and  of  large  anemones.  In  the  little  pine 
grove,  heather,  growing  tall  as  trees,  waved  in  the  sea 
wind  its  clusters  of  a  very  soft  white,  and  the  laurel 
its  bouquets  of  a  very  clear  white.  The  breeze  brought, 
with  its  smell  of  the  sea,  the  mingled  fragrance  of 
these  resins  and  these  corollas,  that,  also,  of  wild  rose- 
mary and  cysts.  Here  and  there,  forms  of  exotic  vege- 
tation were  confusedly  visible :  the  broad  leaves  of  date 
palms,  the  twisted  poniards  of  the  agave,  the  pointed 
feathers  of  the  yucca.  And  this  adorable  vision  of  an 
almost  Oriental  spring  was  completed,  was  enchanted, 
was  ennobled  with  a  still  purer  charm,  by  the  devout 
tinkle  of  a  chapel  bell.  This  voice  of  the  little  church 
which  dominates  all  this  region,  and  bears  the  beautiful 
name  of  Our  Lady  of  Consolation,  shed  itself  abroad 
in  this  luminous,  warm,  balsamic  air  in  frail,  silvery 
vibrations.  It  announced  that  this  glorious  morning  in 
spring  was  also  Easter  morning;  and  this  festival  of 
the  Resurrection  harmonized  so  well  with  the  universal 
joy  in  life  spread  everywhere,  that  this  wonderful 
nature  seemed  also,  in  its  sunshine,  its  sea,  its  flowers, 


350  children's  hearts 

to    proclaim    the    victory    of    Love    triumphant    over 
Death. 


II 

Alas !  it  was  just  this  very  festival  of  Life,  in 
nature  and  in  the  church,  in  the  visible  and  the 
invisible  heaven,  that  overwhelmed  the  young  woman 
with  the  cruellest  melancholy,  on  this  wonderful  Easter 
morning.  The  sombre  crape  that  she  wore,  which 
adorned  with  pathetic  grace  her  delicate  blonde  beauty, 
told  of  a  grief  borne  hopelessly  in  her  heart.  Her  soft 
blue  eyes,  almost  dulled  from  tears,  seemed  hurt  by 
the  radiant  splendour  of  the  perfect  day.  Her  pale 
brow  was  clouded  with  a  sadder  thought  at  each  ring- 
ing of  the  bell.  She  had  lost  a  son  —  an  only  son  —  four 
months  before,  and  in  the  mother's  heart  the  open 
wound  bled  the  more,  at  sight  of  this  fairy  world  of  the 
new  springtime  which  her  Andre  would  not  see,  at  sound 
of  this  appeal  to  a  God  to  whom  she  prayed  no  longer, 
to  whom  she  could  no  longer  pray,  since  He  had  taken 
her  child.  Seated  on  the  warm  terrace,  she  looked  about 
her  with  the  mechanical  and  careless  look  of  despair. 
From  all  points  of  the  splendid  horizon,  images  arose, 
as  she  looked,  and  trains  of  ideas  followed  these  images, 
which  rendered  more  definite,  more  unendurable,  all  the 
lesser  details  of  her  misfortune.  This  sudden  death 
of  a  boy  six  years  old,  carried  off  by  meningitis  after 
but  a  few  days'  illness,  was  in  itself  a  very  severe  trial. 


children's  hearts  351 

Personal  circumstances  had  aggravated  its  weight,  and 
the  young  woman  realized  them  anew,  one  by  one,  in 
the  presence  of  this  scene,  filled  for  her  with  so  much 
of  the  past.  That  shining  water  of  the  quiet  bay  was 
the  sea,  the  impassable  sea,  across  which  Ludovic  de 
Fresne,  her  husband,  had  been  obliged  to  go,  to  the 
far  East,  ten  months  before.  She  had  accompanied 
him,  a  lieutenant  in  the  navy,  to  Toulon,  —  a  wife,  so 
afflicted,  a  mother,  so  happy !  And  now,  that  she  had 
such  need  of  him  to  endure  the  horrible  thing,  thousands 
of  miles  separated  them  from  each  other.  When  would 
he  return,  to  speak  the  words  that  would  give  her  cour- 
age to  live  for  her  duty  ?  What  duty  ?  The  sound  of 
the  bell  announcing  the  service,  which  her  inward  revolt 
prevented  her  from  attending,  repeated  it  to  her  all  too 
clearly.  If  Mme.  de  Fresne  had  stood  up,  she  might 
have  seen,  upon  the  ribbon  of  road  which,  from  the 
door  of  the  villa,  winds  through  the  woods  to  the  chapel, 
a  carriage  drawn  by  a  pony,  and  in  the  carriage  two 
children  in  mourning  like  herself  —  a  boy  of  nine,  a  lit- 
tle girl  of  eight.  These  two,  Guy  and  Alice,  were  her 
husband's  children  by  a  former  marriage.  She  remem- 
bered, when  she  had  married  the  naval  officer,  who 
was  also  her  cousin,  how  sincere  had  been  her  pity  for 
the  motherless  boy  and  girl.  How  faithful  had  been  her 
efforts  to  fill  the  place  of  the  dead,  so  that  now,  at  their 
present  ages  of  eight  and  nine,  they  had  no  idea  that 
she  was  not  their  own  mother !     When  she  herself  had 


352  childeen's  hearts 

had  a  son,  how  scrupulously  had  she  avoided  showing  a 
preference  for  him !  And  she  had  even  been  able  to  do 
this  without  effort.  While  the  three  fair  children  were 
running,  laughing,  playing  around  her,  her  heart  had 
naturally  been  shared  by  the  three.  Why  was  this  no 
longer  so? 

Why  ?  The  young  woman  had  but  to  turn  toward 
the  left,  toward  a  point  that  she  knew  too  well,  to  have 
an  answer  to  this  question.  There,  beyond  the  last 
houses  of  the  city,  a  depression  marked  the  hollow  of  a 
valley  —  it  was  the  cemetery.  From  the  day  when  she 
had  herself  seen  —  her  courage  had  carried  her  to  that 
point  —  the  little  coffin  of  her  poor  Andre  slip  down 
the  ropes  into  the  newly  dug  grave,  a  frightful  feeling 
had  seized  upon  her  against  which  she  had  struggled  and 
struggled  still,  in  vain ;  and  on  that  Easter  morning  she 
had  felt  it  stronger  than  ever  in  her  heart.  She  could 
not  forgive  the  two  children  for  being  merry  and  yo\ing,  for 
walking  and  talking  and  breathing — in  short,  for  being 
alive,  while  the  third,  the  little  one,  7ier  boy,  lay  motion- 
less in  his  grave.  She  had  not  only  ceased  to  love  them : 
at  times  it  seemed  to  her  —  and  all  her  being  shuddered  at 
the  thought  —  that  she  hated  them,  as  if  they  had  stolen 
from  the  absent  one  his  share  of  joy  and  health  and  sun- 
light. To  hear  them  call  her  "  mamma,"  gave  her  an  un- 
natural, cruel  desire  to  cry  out  to  them,  "  Be  silent,  I 
am  not  your  mother ! "  so  that  these  two  syllables  might 
never  more  be  addressed  to  her  by  any  one,  since  the  dear 


children's  hearts  353 

little  mouth,  which  alone  had  the  right  truly  to  speak 
them,  must  never  again  say  them  to  her.  This  Easter 
morning,  that  passionate  bitterness  against  her  step-chil- 
dren had  been  more  intense  than  usual.  It  had  been  her 
wish  to  give  them  herself  their  Easter  eggs,  as  she  had 
done  hitherto.  She  could  indeed  do  herself  this  justice : 
the  more  this  imjust  hatred  grew  in  her  heart,  the  more 
care  she  took  not  to  betray  it  by  any  act.  The  children 
had  come  to  her  room.  She  had  seen  their  eyes  shine 
with  expectation,  their  eager  hands  open  the  great  eggs 
of  coloured  wood,  their  faces  become  radiant  with  delight 
over  the  objects  she  had  selected  for  them :  a  pretty  pin 
for  the  boy,  a  chain  with  a  cross  for  the  girl.  Ah !  the 
innocent  but  cruel  torturers,  how  they  had  plunged  the 
knife  again  into  her  heart,  with  their  frank  joy,  their 
pleasure  of  being  alive  and  in  the  world,  which  made 
even  their  black  garments  cheerful !  The  other  had  come 
to  her  in  thought,  with  a  reproach  for  being  forgotten, 
in  his  lifeless  eyes.  A  sob  had  come  into  her  throat ;  she 
had  had  the  strength  to  suppress  it,  however ;  and  it  was 
to  beguile  a  little  this  sharp  surprise  of  her  grief  that 
she  had  come  alone,  while  Guy  and  Alice  were  gone  to 
church,  to  sit  here  on  this  deserted  terrace.  Might  she 
not  have  known,  however,  that  the  grief  at  her  heart 
would  become  more  keen  instead  of  being  lulled,  in  the 
midst  of  Nature's  infinite  felicity? 


354  children's  hearts 


III 

The  water  was  still  blue  and  lustrous,  the  islands 
lifted  their  purple  cliffs  against  a  cloudless  horizon, 
the  mountains  rose  in  soft  curving  outlines,  the  flowers 
exhaled  their  fragrance,  the  sunlight  filtered  through 
the  Aleppo  pines,  an  impalpable  dust  of  gold,  the 
exotic  shrubs  throbbed  under  the  sky,  as  if  reminded 
of  the  far-away  climates  which  were  the  home  of 
their  strong  essences.  Only  the  bell  had  ceased  ring- 
ing, in  the  carved  turret  of  the  chapel.  And  in  the 
silence  of  the  happy  country,  the  voices  of  regret  and 
despair  moaned,  more  and  more  intensely,  in  the 
mother's  heart  —  a  voice  of  revolt,  too,  and  of  hatred. 
Again  the  insupportably  painful  impressions  inflicted 
by  the  contrast  between  this  festival  of  life  blooming 
around  her,  and  her  irreparable  grief,  gathered  them- 
selves into  that  strange  feeling  of  irresistible  antipa- 
thy toward  the  happiness  of  her  step-children.  There 
was  in  the  very  depths  of  her  nature  an  upheaval  of 
envy  and  hatred,  shameful  yet  invincible.  Yes,  she 
envied  this  half-brother  and  half-sister  of  her  Andre 
all  this  springtime  that  her  own  little  dead  child 
could  no  longer  enjoy,  all  that  boundless  future  that 
their  youth  could  look  forward  to.  She  wondered,  her- 
self, at  the  frenzy  of  aversion  with  which  she  grudged 
it  to  them;  and  without  any  motive  for  it,  but  merely 
at  thought  of  their  faces,   she  felt  herself  the  cruel 


children's  hearts  856 

step-mother  of  tradition,  with  an  instinctive  furious 
horror  at  these  children  of  a  first  marriage,  of  which 
she  had  not  believed  herself  capable.  Without  doubt, 
it  was  most  unjust.  But  is  there  justice  in  the  world? 
No,  the  two  children  did  not  deserve  that  their 
father's  second  wife,  she  to  whom  the  absent  father 
had  intrusted  them,  should  feel  toward  them  this 
wicked  resentment.  But  she  herself,  had  she  de- 
served that  her  darling  should  be  snatched  from  her, 
in  this  sudden  and  terrible  way  ?  This  woman,  who 
had  been  gentle  and  religious,  indulgent  and  devoted,  — 
who  was  so  still,  in  her  acts,  from  the  acquired 
strength  of  her  former  virtues,  —  underwent  this  evil 
change,  by  reason  of  a  grief  too  constantly  acute  and  too 
intense :  a  very  demon  of  wickedness,  almost  of  ferocity, 
stirred  within  her,  which  plucked  from  her  suddenly, 
in  the  presence  of  this  landscape,  all  harmony  and 
peace  and  beauty,  the  dreadful  words  which  she  cried 
aloud  —  to  whom  ?  to  nature  ?  to  God  ?  to  the  spring- 
time ?  — 

"  Oh !  if  only  one  of  them  were  dead,  too ! " 
She  heard  herself  say  these  words,  in  which  the 
frenzy  of  her  grief  found  utterance,  with  a  sort  of  stupor, 
which  led  her  to  rise  from  her  seat  on  the  rock.  She 
passed  her  hands  over  her  eyes,  as  if  to  exorcise  the 
temptation  of  this  dreadful  wish,  and  began  walking 
through  the  wood  again,  this  time  with  rapid  step,  as  if 
seeking  to  flee  from  the  too  luminous  landscape,  to  flee 


356  children's  hearts 

from  the  sight  of  the  road  by  which  her  two  step- 
children would  return,  to  flee  from  her  own  thoughts,  to 
flee  from  her  very  self.  She  went  on,  choosing,  in  the 
immense,  half-wild  park,  the  narrow,  almost  impractica- 
ble paths  where  the  dry  branches  caught  her  dress  and 
the  pine  cones  cracked  and  slipped  under  her  feet  and 
her  hands  were  constantly  putting  aside  some  thorny 
shrub,  some  overgrown  branch  of  heather.  And  while 
she  thus  walked  on  in  a  sort  of  delirium,  hurting  her 
feet  against  the  rough  path  and  her  fingers  against  the 
thorny  branches,  her  thoughts  were  very  active  also. 
The  violent  outbreak  of  hatred  that  she  had  once  more 
experienced  against  Guy  and  Alice  was  appeased. 
But  there  remained  in  her  heart  an  extreme  lassitude 
and  this  substratum  of  invincible  repulsion,  which  she 
now  avowed  to  herself  and  judged  almost  legitimate,  as 
the  reprisals  permitted  to  her  misfortune.  She  walked 
on,  and  a  resolution  took  definite  shape  in  her  mind 
which  had  haunted  her  often,  but  never  with  this  hyp- 
notizing distinctness.  Why  continue  toward  these  two 
beings,  whose  mere  presence  was  a  torture  to  her,  this 
burdensome  duty  —  this  farce,  rather,  of  a  false  mother- 
hood ?  Why  not  rid  herself  of  them  both,  treating  them 
as,  after  all,  so  many  true  parents  treat  their  true  chil- 
dren? Instead  of  keeping  them  at  home,  as  she  was 
doing,  why  not  send  them  away  —  the  boy  to  school,  the 
girl  to  a  convent  —  that  she  might  be  left  alone  with  her 
dead  boy,  and  no  longer  hear  about  her  these  voices,  this 


children's  hearts  86T 

laughter,  these  games,  all  this  gay  life  which  insulted 
her  suffering  ?  They  would  not  be  happy  —  Guy,  whom 
she  knew  to  be  so  sensitive,  Alice,  whom  she  knew  so 
fastidious  —  in  the  promiscuousness  of  school  life.  How 
many  other  little  boys  and  little  girls  of  their  age  were 
enduring,  at  this  moment,  exile  from  home  and  were 
growing  up,  all  the  same?  Besides,  if  they  were  not 
happy,  that  would  be  but  just.  Elizabeth  knew,  also, 
that  their  mother,  on  her  death-bed,  had  implored  their 
father  to  renounce  his  career,  that  he  might  not  be 
separated  from  the  children,  and  to  love  them  for  both, 
since  henceforth  they  would  have  but  him.  With  what 
compassion  had  the  young  step-mother  accepted  this  last 
wish,  and  taken  upon  herself  its  fulfilment :  "  Since  he 
continues  in  the  service,  it  is  I  who  will  never  leave 
them,  and  will  be  to  them  what  she  would  have  been ! " 
To  send  them  away — these  children —  from  the  paternal 
hearth,  was  this  obeying  the  sacred  wish  of  the  dead,  of 
the  woman  whose  place  she  had  taken,  vowing  to  herself 
that  she  would  fill  it  faithfully  ?  Elizabeth's  conscience 
said  to  her,  no.  But  the  awakened  "  step-mother  "  is  not 
easily  lulled  to  sleep.  And  the  wife  who  was  alive 
began  feeling,  for  this  dead  woman  whose  children  lived 
while  her  child  was  no  more,  that  sharp  retrospective 
jealousy  which  poisons  so  many  second  marriages,  and 
makes  the  best  of  women  sometimes  become  the  most 
implacable,  the  most  conscienceless  of  torturers.  Pre- 
cisely because  this  boarding-school  and  convent  life  must 


358  children's  hearts 

have  been  one  of  the  haunting  terrors  of  her  predecessor's 
death-bed,  the  second  wife  enjoyed  in  it  a  vague  charm 
of  revenge.  And  she  felt,  also,  that  it  would  be  only  a 
beginning,  a  first  step  upon  a  road  of  cruelty  which  she 
should  follow  to  the  end.  The  father  would  return. 
What  would  she  say  to  him  ?  The  temptation  was  still 
more  guilty  here.  She  was  herself  the  only  witness 
whom  the  children  had  with  the  absent  sailor.  It  would 
be  so  easy  to  write  to  him  that  she  had  not  been  able  to 
keep  them  with  her  on  account  of  this  or  that  fault. 
And  here  she  might  speak  truly :  the  boy  was  naturally 
high-tempered,  the  girl  impertinent.  Up  to  this  time, 
Elizabeth  had  always  stood  between  the  children's  faults 
and  the  severity  of  the  officer,  as  their  mother  would 
have  done.  Let  her  act  otherwise  —  had  she  not  the 
right?  —  and  sending  them  to  the  boarding-school  and 
the  convent  would  appear  so  simple,  so  useful,  so  needful ! 
She  would  have  impaired  the  father's  affection  for  his 
children!  —  how  little  that  was  like  what  she  had 
promised  herself  to  do!  But  no  matter,  if  it  were  a 
relief  to  herself. 

rv 

Every  soul  has  its  own  spiritual  atmosphere,  outside 
of  which  it  cannot  long  breathe.  A  noble  nature  may 
indeed  suffer  itself  to  be  drawn  away  into  unworthy 
resolutions  and,  in  some  excess  of  error,  begin  to  put 
them  into  effect.     It  cannot  do  this  contentedly.     When 


childkbn's  hearts  359 

tlie  young  wife  said,  "  I  am  determined ;  within  a  week 
they  shall  be  sent  away,"  she  attempted  to  put  aside 
all  thought  both  of  the  children  to  whom  she  was  going 
to  be  so  hard,  and  of  the  wicked  rdle  she  proposed  to 
play  toward  their  father.  Instinctively  she  strove 
to  lull  the  scruples  which  already  arose  in  the  pure 
depths  of  her  conscience,  by  absorbing  herself  in  the 
memory  of  her  child.  She  evoked  the  little  phantom, 
with  an  ardour  of  regret  which  brought  him  once  more 
before  her  just  as  if  she  had  not  seen  him  lying  rigid 
on  his  little  cot,  his  poor  lips  parted  and  breathless, 
his  eyes  closed,  his  waxen  hands  crossed  upon  the 
crucifix  —  as  if  the  coffin  lid  had  not  been  screwed 
down  over  that  frail,  motionless  thing  that  yester- 
day was  a  merry  child!  Again  he  was  at  her  side, 
with  the  sunlight  on  his  golden  hair.  The  vision 
was  so  distinct,  so  besetting,  that  the  mother  felt  an 
irresistible  desire  to  give  some  real  food  to  her  affec- 
tion, a  need  of  doing  something  in  which  this  idolized 
son  would  be  concerned,  a  passionate  desire  to  serve  him. 
She  began  gathering  the  finest  bits  among  the  tufts  of 
white  heather,  to  carry  them  to  him,  to  adorn  his  room. 
From  the  day  when  the  child's  body  had  been  removed 
from  the  house  to  the  grave,  the  mother  had  not  per- 
mitted a  single  article  of  furniture  in  that  room  to  be 
changed.  She  had  already  obtained  from  her  husband 
the  promise  that  on  his  return  he  would  buy  the  house, 
hired  at  first  on  account  of  its  being  near  Toulon,  where 


360  children's  hearts 

the  lieutenant  was  then  on  duty.  How  many  women  — 
mothers,  wives,  or  daughters — have  sought  to  prolong 
the  existence  of  some  one  very  dear  to  them,  by  keeping 
for  him  all  the  objects  to  which  he  had  been  habitu- 
ated !  And  then,  the  priestess  of  this  domestic  cult 
herself  disappears ;  and  the  relics  which  were  her 
treasure  are  now  the  worn  and  worthless  stuff  for  an 
auction  room.  Who  can  blame  a  faithful  heart  for 
guarding  a  little  while  against  inevitable  destruction, 
these  precious,  humble  things  so  personal  that  they 
almost  are  persons  ?  For  these  four  months  the 
mother  had  never  failed  to  go  night  and  morning 
into  the  little  bedroom  where  her  boy  had  drawn  his 
last  breath.  She  would  open  the  shutters,  and  dust 
the  furniture,  and  unfold  the  little  garments  which 
kept  the  outlines  of  the  little  form.  It  was  this  use- 
less, passionate  act  of  broken-hearted  devotion  that  she 
now  went  to  perform.  Her  sheaf  of  white  heather  had 
become  too  large  for  her  hands  to  carry.  She  held  it 
now  in  her  arms  and,  a  pleased  yet  most  unhappy 
reaper  with  her  useless  spoils,  she  went  down  the 
hill  toward  the  villa,  which  apjjeared  through  the 
Aleppo  pines,  the  palm  trees  and  the  yuccas,  the  Villa 
Rose,  so  called,  —  a  sad  mockery!  —  and  all  pink  it 
was,  the  colour  of  joy  and  hope!  And  it  was  a  tragic 
and  poignant  sight  —  this  fair-haired  young  woman, 
all  in  black,  with  her  fragrant  sheaf  of  white  heather, 
on  her  way  to  the  gay-tinted  house,  under  this  clear 


children's  hearts  861 

blue  sky,  through  this  luxuriant  garden  —  as  one  goes 
toward  a  grave,  to  carry  flowers  to  it  and  to  weep 
there. 


The  mother  had  entered  the  villa  by  the  rear  door, 
so  lost  in  her  thoughts  that  she  had  not  noticed  the 
coachman  in  front  of  the  stable,  washing  the  wheels 
of  the  English  cart,  which  signified  that  her  sad  walk 
had  considerably  outlasted  the  service  at  the  chapel. 
Guy  and  Alice  had  been  at  home  some  time.  And  so, 
as  Elizabeth  entered  the  passageway  which  led  to  the 
little  room  of  her  dead  boy,  it  was  a  shock,  almost  like 
the  sight  of  a  ghost,  to  see  the  door  ajar  and  to  hear 
voices,  those  of  the  two  children,  the  thought  of  whom 
had  haunted  her  all  the  morning  in  a  way  so  hateful  and 
unjust.  What  were  they  doing,  in  this  room  to  which 
she  had  strictly  forbidden  entrance,  and  in  which  per- 
fect darkness  would  have  prevailed  had  not  one  ray 
of  sunshine,  from  the  crack  of  the  shutters  to  the 
partly  opened  door,  cut  it  with  a  bar  of  light  ?  Her 
armful  of  heather  clasped  tight  to  her  heart,  which 
was  beating  fast,  she  stood  still  to  hear  what  these 
two  visitors  were  saying,  whose  movements  she  could 
not  clearly  distinguish,  and  with  an  emotion  of  which 
she  could  not  have  told  whether  it  were  a  delight  or 
an  anguish,  she  became  aware  that  this  half-brother 
and  this  half-sister  of  poor  Andre  had  preceded  her  in 


362  children's  hearts 

the  loving  pilgrimage  on  which  she  had  come.  On 
that  radiant  morning  the  two  affectionate  children  had 
remembered  the  little  playmate  who  was  no  longer  with 
them.  They  had  gathered  flowers  in  the  garden,  as 
she  had  done  in  the  park,  and  with  pathetic  childish- 
ness they  had  sought  to  associate  the  absent  one  with 
the  special  holiday  by  bringing  him  an  Easter  gift  — 
eggs  that  they  had  bought  at  the  chapel  door. 

"  You  must  put  those  flowers  here ! "  said  the  voice 
of  Alice.  "Do  you  remember  the  butterflies  that  we 
used  to  catch  for  him  on  the  roses?" 

"  And  here,  the  eggs,"  Guy  said,  "  as  we  did  last  year. 
He  was  so  pleased !  How  I  wish  I  could  see  him  and 
kiss  him  now ! " 

"That  is  impossible,  because  he  is  dead.  But  we 
shall  see  him  again  in  heaven,"  replied   the  little  girl. 

"Perhaps  he  might  rise  from  the  dead,"  the  boy 
answered.  "Lazarus  did,  and  our  Lord  —  I  beg  God 
to  let  him,  every  night  and  every  morning.  I  think 
mamma  does,  too.  It  would  be  a  miracle,  that  is  all! 
And  why  should  not  God  do  it  for  us?  For  there  are 
miracles  I " 

The  innocent  believer,  aged  nine,  who  said  these 
words,  had  no  idea  that,  in  truth,  a  miracle  took  place, 
at  his  voice,  close  beside  him,  —  a  resurrection,  also, 
a  resurrection  of  justice  and  pity,  of  affection  and  of 
duty,  of  generous  and  lofty  virtues,  in  the  heart  of 
her  who  had  been  so  near  becoming,  toward  himself 


children's  hearts  363 

and    his    sister,  the    most    implacable    of    cruel    step- 
mothers. 

Thus  to  come  unawares  upon  the  innocent  proof  of 
these  motherless  children's  affection  for  their  dead 
brother,  had  moved  her  past  all  power  of  expression, 
and  —  at  first  with  a  fear  of  being  scolded,  changed 
at  once  into  so  sweet  a  sympathy  —  Guy  and  Alice 
saw  the  door  open  wide  and  the  mother  enter, — 
their  mother,  —  who  held  out  her  flowers  to  them,  say- 
ing, "Give  him  these,  also,  with  your  own;"  then 
took  them  in  her  arms,  both  at  once,  clasping  them 
close  to  her  breast,  fondly,  passionately,  as  she  would 
have  clasped  the  other.  Was  she  not  recovering  them, 
after  having  lost  them  ?  And  her  tears,  of  no  less 
grief,  were  made  more  gentle  by  affection,  as  if  the 
spirit  of  her  lost  darling  had  whispered  low  to  her, 
"  Love  them  —  because  they  love  me  so  much ! "  The 
wicked  rancour,  the  evil  resolves,  the  cruel  envy,  all 
the  ferments  of  the  baser  passions,  were  dissolved, 
melted,  destroyed,  in  these  kisses.  Once  more  the 
great  mystery  of  restored  life,  celebrated  by  the  church, 
and  visible  in  this  spring  landscape,  took  place  in  a 
human  heart:  Life  had  expelled  Death,  Love  had 
conquered  Hate. 

ApEiL  1897 


other   Books    by    Paul   Bourget 


Outre-Mer 

IMPRESSIONS    OF    AMERICA 
Translated  from  the  French.    lamo,  $1.75 


CHAPTER 

HEADINGS 

I. 

At  Sea 

VI. 

The  Lower  Orders 

II. 

The  First  Week 

VII. 

Education 

III. 

Society 

VIII. 

American  Pleasures 

A  Summer  City 

IX. 

Down  South 

IV. 

Society 

In  Georgia 

Women  and  Young  Girls 

X. 

Down  South 

V. 

Business   Men  and  Busi- 

In Florida 

ness  Scenes 

XI. 

Homeward 

OPINIONS    OF   THE   PRESS 

"  It  is,  in  truth,  a  book  of  no  ordinary  weight  and  usefulness 
which  M.  Bourget  has  given  us,  a  book  that  may  be  perused  with 
profit  by  the  statesman  and  reformer  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlan- 
tic, and  at  the  same  time,  for  the  reason  that  the  writer  is  an 
artist,  a  book  certain  to  give  delight  to  those  who  read  for  amuse- 
ment only."  —  New  York  Sun. 

"M.  Bourgefs  new  book  on  America  is  as  interesting  as  a 
novel.  The  historian  of  '  Cosmopolis,'  the  painter  of  'Pastels,' 
visited  America  in  the  hope  of  gathering  '  a  rich  harvest  of  ideas 
and  memories ' ;  and  the  reader  will  certainly  incline  to  assert 
that  he  returns  bringing  his  sheaves  with  him.  When  a  novelist 
turns  traveller,  one  looks  for  something  more  readable  than  mere 
statistical  inquiries,  and  in  this  case  at  least  one  is  not  disap- 
pointed."— The  Academy. 


other   Books    by    Paul   Bourget 
(Outre-Mer) 

"The  mirror  that  he  holds  up  to  us  is  an  unclouded  one, 
wherein  we  may  see  what  manner  of  men  and  women  we  are  in 
the  eyes  of  a  cultured  Frenchman  who  is  a  student  of  manners 
and  a  master  of  expression.  M.  Bourget  did  not  come  to  our 
shores  fettered  with  a  ready-made  theory  of  us,  into  which  the 
facts  gathered  must  be  made  to  fit.  Facts  first,  conclusions 
afterwards,  has  been  his  rule."  —  The  Dial. 

"  A  singularly  interesting  work  in  that  it  comes  from  a  trained 
and  practiced  observer,  who  sees  and  notes  things  which  most 
of  us  merely  glance  at  and  straightway  forget."  —  The  Nation. 


Antigone 

AND   OTHER   PORTRAITS   OF  WOMEN 

["  Voyageuses  "] 
Translated  from  the  French  by  William  Marchant.    lamo,  $1.50 


CONTENTS 


Antigone 

Two  Married  Couples 

Neptune  Vale 


A  Woman's  Charity 

Odile 

La  Plv 


OPINIONS    OF   THE   PRESS 

"In  none  of  his  translated  romances  does  M.  Paul  Bourget 
make  such  an  agreeable  impression  on  the  English  reader  as 
in  '  Antigone,  and  Other  Portraits  of  Women.'  These  women, 
known  but  slightly  through  the  chance  of  travel,  attracted  him 
by  a  hint  of  some  rare  nobility  or  grace  of  nature  and  touched 
his  imagination  to  weave  about  them  romance  of  delicate  texture, 
glowing  with  sentiment,  yet  not  sentimental ;  pathetic,  even 
tragic,  yet  with  no  forced  unhealthy  note.  The  scenes  which 
the  presence  of  these  women  made  an  imperishable  memory  are 
described  with  a  genuine  feeling  for  natural  beauty  and  for  artis- 


other   Books    by    Paul   Bourget 

\  (Antigone) 

tic  harmony  between  picture  and  frame.     Incident  and  place  are 
so  closely  related  that  to  think  of  one  is  to  remember  all." 

—  The  Nation. 

"Among  the  highest  and  best  specimens  of  M.  Bourget's  work. 
They  are  full  of  charm,  a  simplicity  which  is  consistent  with  per- 
fect grace.  In  their  core  they  are  essentially  as  sweet  as  Wash- 
ington Irving's  tales,  yet  elaborated  in  detail  with  the  pictorial 
skill  of  the  finished  modern  artist."  —  Boston  Transcript. 

"  We  are  impelled  to  say  that  the  delicate  charm  of  M.  Bourget's 
style,  and  the  penetrative  sympathy  with  which  he  has  studied 
human  life,  appeal  to  us  more  strongly  from  this  book  than  from 
any  other  he  has  written."  —  The  Dial. 


A  Tragic   Idyl 

Translated  from  the  French,     xamo,  $1.50 
OPINIONS    OF   THE   PRESS 

"In  this  narrative  there  is  both  strength  and  power.     The 
author  has  a  fine  literary  method  and  a  subtle  comprehension  of 
Viuman  character.      His   analyses    are   keen   and   incisive,  his 
delineations  so  vivid  his  people  live  before  us." 

—  Detroit  Free  Press. 

"M.  Bourget  changes  his  style  with  his  skies,  and  his  new 
romance  reflects  the  voluptuous  charm  and  evanescent  color  of 
that  southern  shore  where  his  drama  wears  out  to  a  sad  end.  .  .  . 
He  polishes  and  refines  his  art  of  description  and  analysis  to  a 
point  of  exquisite  detail."  —  Philadelphia  Public  Ledger. 

Charles   Scribner's  Sons,  Publishers 

153-157  Fifth  Avenue    :     :     :     :     New  York 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACIUTY 


A     000  130  743     8 


JAM  2 1 1991 


OCT  0  2 }« 


r 


